A little brother to the bear, and other animal studies

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
AT LOS ANGELES

Gift of
Mrs. ^eonora B. Lucas

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A Little Brother
to the Bear

A fierce battle in
the tree-tops "

bx School of foe if/Sods
Beasts of the field

Ay

Copeland

ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL

COPYRIGHT, 1903
BY WILLIAM J. LONG

LL RIGHTS RESERVED

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^dedicate ffiis AooA,
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111

HE object of this httle book, so far
as it has an object beyond that of
sharing a simple pleasure of mine
with others, will be found in the first chapter,
entitled " The Point of View " ; and the title
will be explained in the chapter on "A Little
Brother to the Bear" that follows.

All the sketches here are reproduced from
my own note-books largely, or from my own
memory, and the obser- \ .?^~Y~v'
vat ions cover a period

d^kr'^4 -

462557

• of some thirty years, — from the time when I
first began to prowl about the home woods
with a child's wonder and delight to my last
hard winter trip into the Canadian wilder-
ness. Some of the chapters, like those of the
Woodcock and the Coon, represent the charac-
teristics of scores of animals and birds of the
same species ; others, like those of the Bear
and Eider-Duck in "Animal Surgery" repre-
sent the acute intelligence of certain individ-
ual animals that nature seems to have lifted
enormously above the level of their fellows ;
and in a single case — that of the Toad — /
have, for tlie story s sake, gathered into one
creatitre the habits of four or Jive of these
humble little helpers of ours that I have
watched at different times and in different
places.

The queer names herein used for beasts
and birds are those given by the Milicete
Indians, and represent usually some sound
or suggestion of the creatures themselves.
Except where it is plainly stated otherwise,
all the incidents and observations have passed
under my own eyes and have been confirmed

later by other observers. In the records, while
holding closely to the facts, I have simply
tried to make all these animals as interesting
to the reader as they were to me when I
discovered them.

XV

WM. /. LONG.

Stamford, Septembe

THE POINT OF VIEW

A LITTLE BROTHER TO THE BEAR .

WHITOOWEEK THE HERMIT

A WOODCOCK GENIUS

WHEN UPWEEKIS GOES HUNTING .

K'DUNK THE FAT ONE .

MOOWEEN'S DEN .

KINGFISHER'S KINDERGARTEN .

PEKOMPF'S CUNNING

ANIMAL SURGERY .

HUNTING WITHOUT A GUN

GLOSSARY OF INDIAN NAMES .
xvii

PAGE
I

A FIERCE BATTLE IN THE TREE-TOPS " . . Frontispiece

PAGE
' THE LITTLE ONES CAME OUT OF THEIR DEN AND BEGAN

PLAYING TOGETHER "

; LEAPING OUT OF THE TREE-TOP AND HURLING HIM-
SELF INTO THE FIGHT"

' ONE OF THE CHICKS WAS RESTING UPON THE MOTHER'S

BACK "

1 ONCE MY OLD DOG DON STARTED A WOODCOCK "

; THEN HE, TOO, SHOT OVER THE ROCK "...

'THE SOFT TONGUE STRUCK ONE OF HIS TRAILING

LEGS "

MOOWEEN HAD BEEN HERE MANY TIMES AHEAD OF
ME"

IlE DROVE OFF A MINK AND ALMOST KILLED THE
SAVAGE CREATURE"

A FLASH OF SILVER FOLLOWING THE QUICK JERK OF
HIS PAW"

'ESCAPED AT LAST BY SWIMMING AN ICY RIVER".
'THE BEAR AND HER CUBS ARE GATHERING BLUE-
BERRIES IN THEIR GREEDY, FUNNY WAY " . . 243
' LUNGED AWAY AT A TERRIFIC PACE " . . . . 265
xix

TifPQINT
OF VIEW

»

N old Indian, whom
I know well, told
me that he once
caught a bear in his deadfall. That same
day the bear's mate came and tried to lift
away the heavily weighted log that had fallen
on her back and crushed her. Failing in
this he broke his way into the inclosure ; and V
when the. Indian came, drawn in on silent,
inquisitive feet by a curious low sound in
the air, the bear was sitting beside his dead J
mate, holding her head in his arms, rocking
it to and fro, moaning. —

Two things must be done by the modern
nature writer who would first understand
the animal world and then share his dis-
covery witn others. He must collect his
facts, at first hand if possible, and then
he must interpret the facts as they appeal
to his own head and heart in the light of
all the circumstances that surround them.
The child will be content with his animal
story, but the man will surely ask the why
and the how of every fact of animal life
that particularly appeals to him. For every
fact is also a revelation, and is chiefly inter-
esting, not for itself, but for the law or the
life which lies behind it and which it in
some way expresses. An apple falling to
the ground was a common enough fact, — so
common that it had no interest until some
one thought about it and found the great
law that grips alike the falling apple and
the falling star.

It is so in the animal world. The com-
mon facts of color, size, and habit were seen
for centuries, but had little meaning or inter-
est until some one thought about them and

gave us the law of species. For most birds
and animals these common facts and their
meaning are now well known, and it is a
wearisome and thankless task to go over
them again. The origin of species and the
law of gravitation are now put in the same
comfortable category with the steam engine
and the telegraph wire and other things that
we think we understand. Meanwhile the air
has unseen currents that are ready to bear
our messages, and the sun wastes enough
energy on our unresponsive planet daily to
make all our fires unneces-
sary, if we but
understood.
Meanwhile, i n

the animal world, an immense array of new
facts are hidden away, or are slowly coming
to light as nature students follow the wild
things in their native haunts and find how
widely they differ one from another of the
same kind, and how far they transcend the
printed lists of habits that are supposed to
belong to them.

We were too long content with the ugly
telegraph pole and wire as the limit of per-
fection in communication ; and we have been
too well satisfied with the assumption that
animals are governed by some queer, un-
known thing called instinct, and that all are
' alike that belong to the same class. That
is true only outwardly. It is
enough to give the animal a
specific name, but no more ; and
animal's name or species is
not the chief thing
about him. You are
not through with In-
dians when you have
determined their

race. That is sufficient for ethnology; to
write in a book: possibly also the Calvin-
istic theologian was one time satisfied there-
with; but the Indian's life still remains, more
important than his race, and only after two
centuries of neglect, or persecution, or injus-
tice, are we awaking to the fact that his life
is one of extraordinary human interest. His
medicine lore and his thoughts of God lie
deeper than the curve of his cranium; his
legends and his rude music must be inter-
preted, as well as the color of his skin, and
we are but just beginning to see the meaning
of these larger things.

All this is only an analogy and proves
nothing. However, it may suggest, if one
thinks about it, that possibfy we have made
a slightly similar mistake about the animals ;
that we are not quite through with them
when we have cried instinct and named
their species, nor altogether justified in kill-
ing them industriously off the face of the
earth — as we once did with the poor Beothuk
Indians for the skins that they wore. Be-
neath their fur and feathers is their life ; and

a few observers are learning that their life
also, with its faint suggestion of our own
primeval childhood, is one of intense human
interest. Some of them plan and calculate ;
and mathematics, however elementary, is
hardly a matter of instinct. Some of them
build dams and canals; some have definite
social regulations; some rescue
comrades; some bind their own
wounds, and even set a broken leg,
as will be seen in one of the fol-
lowing chapters. All higher orders
communicate more or less with each
other, and train their young, and
modify their habits to meet changing
conditions. These things, and many
more quite as wonderful, are also
facts. We are still waiting for the
naturalist who will tell us
truly what they mean.

I have had these two things — the new
facts and the interpretation thereof — in mind
in putting together the following sketches
from my note-books and wilderness records.
The facts have been carefully selected from
many years' observations, with a view of em-
phasizing some of the unusual or unknown
things of the animal world. Indeed, in all
my work, or rather play, out of doors I have
tried to discover the unusual things, — the
things that mark an animal's individuality,
— leaving the work of general habits and
specific classification to other naturalists who
know more and can do it better. Therefore
have I passed over a hundred animals or
birds to watch one, and have recorded only
the rare observations, such as are seldom
seen, and then only by men who spend long
days and seasons in the woods in silent
watchfulness.

Whether these rare habits are common
property among the species, and seem
strange to us only because we know so
very little of the hidden life of wild ani-
mals, or whether they are the discovery of

a few rare individuals better endowed by
nature than their fellows, I must leave to
the reader to determine ; for I do not know.
This determination, however, must come,
not by theory or prejudice or a priori rea-
soning, but simply by watching the animals
more closely when they are unconscious of
man's presence and so express themselves
naturally. As a possible index in the mat-
ter I might suggest that I have rarely made
an observation, however incredible it seemed
to me at the time, without sooner or later
finding some Indian or trapper or natural-
ist who had seen a similar thing among
the wild creatures. The woodcock genius,
whose story is recorded here, is a case in
-' point. So is the porcu-
pine that rolled down a
T long hill for the fun of
the thing apparently — an
observation that has been
twice confirmed, once by
— a New Brunswick poacher
and again by a Harvard
instructor. So also are the
wildcat that stole my net,

and the heron that chummed little fish by a
bait, and the fox that played possum when
caught in a coop, and the kingfishers that
stocked a pool with minnows for their little
ones to catch, and the toad that learned to sit
on a cow's hoof and wait for the flies at milking
time. All these and a score more of incred-
ible things, seen by different observers in
different places, would seem to indicate that
intelligence is more widely spread among the
Wood Folk than we had supposed ; and that,
when we have opened our eyes wider and cast
aside our prejudices, we shall learn that Nature
is generous, even to the little folk, with her
gifts and graces.

As for the interpretation of the facts, upon
which I have occasionally ventured, — that is
wholly my own and is of small consequence
beside the other. Its value is a purely per-
sonal one, and I record it rather to set the
reader thinking for himself than to answer
his questions. In the heart of every man
will be found the measure of his w^orld,
whether it be small or great. He will judge
heat, not by mathematical computation of

12

the sun's energy, but by the twitch of his
burned finger, as every other child does;
an(j comprehend the law of reaction, not
from Ganot's treatise, but by pulling on his
own boot-straps. So, with all the new facts
of animal life before him, he will still live in
a blind world and understand nothing until
he have the courage to look in his own heart
and read. s,^^-^

EW knew the way to the little house
in the rocks where the Little Brother
to the Bear lived. It was miles away from
every other house but one, in the heart of
the big still woods. You had to leave the
highway where it dipped into a cool dark
hollow among the pines, and follow a lonely
old road that the wood-choppers sometimes
used in winter, and that led you, if you fol-
lowed it far enough, to a tumble-down old
mill on another cross-road, where the brook
chattered and laughed all day long at the
rusty wheel, and the phcebe built unmolested

i6

under the sagging beams, and you could
sometimes hear a trout jumping among the
Brother foam bubbles in the twilight. But you did
not g0 so far if you wanted to find where
the Little Brother to the Bear lived.

As you followed the wood road you came
suddenly to a little clearing, with a brook
and a wild meadow and a ledge all covered
with ferns. The road twisted about here, as
a road always does in going by a pretty
place, as if it were turning back for another
look. There was a little old house under
the ledge wherein some shy, silent children
lived; and this was the only dwelling of
man on the three-mile road. Just beyond,
at a point where the underbrush was thick-
est, an unnoticed cart path stole away from
the wood road and brought you to a little
pond in the big woods, at the spot where,
centuries ago, the beavers had made a dam
and a deep place for stowing their winter's
wood. If you took a. long pole and prodded
deep in the mud here, you would sometimes
find a cut stick of the beaver's food wood,
its conical ends showing the strong tooth

v..-

marks plainly, its bark still fresh and waiting
to be eaten when the little owner should
come back again ; for that is what he cut it
and put it there for, untold years ago. Very
few ever thought of this, however; those
who came to the spot had all their thoughts
for the bullpouts that swarmed in the beaver's
old storehouse and that would bite well on
dark days. There were ledges all about the
ancient dam and on both sides of the woodsy
valley below; and among the mossy, fern-
covered rocks of these ledges one of the
shy children, with whom I had made friends,
pointed out an arched doorway made by two
great stones leaning against each other.

" Thome animal livth in there. I theen
him. I peeked, one day, an' I theen hith
eyeth wink; an', an', an' then I ran away,"
he said, his own eyes all round with the
wonder of the woods.

We made no noise, but lay down under
a bush together and watched the wonderful
old doorway until it was time for the shy
child to go home; but nothing came out,
nor even showed a shining inquisitive eye

~

in the doorway behind the screen of hanging
ferns. Still we knew something was in there,
Brother for l showed my little woodsman, to his
Sreat wonder and delight, a short gray hair
tipped with black clinging to the rocks.
Then we went away more cautiously than
we came.

" Maybe it 's a coon," I told the shy child,
"for they are sleepyheads and snooze all
day. Foxy, too; they don't come out till
dark and go in again before daylight, so that
boys can't find out where they live."

When the time of full moon came I went
back to the little house among the ledges,
one afternoon, and hid under the same bush
to watch until something should come out.
But first I looked all about and found
near by a huge hollow chestnut tree that the
wood-choppers had passed by for years as
not worth the cutting. There were scratches
and claw pits everywhere in the rough bark,
and just under the lower limbs Avas a big
dark knot hole that might be a doorway
to a den. So I lay down in hiding where

I could see

both the tree and the fern-screened archway
among the rocks by simply turning my head.

At twilight there were sudden scratchings
in the hollow tree, mounting higher and
higher; then muffled grunts and whinings
and expostulations, as if little voices inside
the tree were saying: My turn first. No,
mine ! E-e-e-e-ahh, get out ! The whinings
stopped abruptly and a face appeared in the
dark knot hole — a sharp, pointed face with
alert ears and bright eyes that looked out
keenly over the still woods where only shad-
ows were creeping about and only a wild
duck disturbed the silence, quacking softly
to her brood in the little pond. Then the
whining began again in the hollow tree, and
four other little faces pushed their sharp
noses into the knot hole, filling it completely,
all watching and listening, and wiggling their
chins down on their fellows' heads so as to
get a better view point, yet all eager as
children to be out and at play after their
long sleep.

One impatient little fellow clawed his way
upon his mother's back and thrust his face

out between her ears, and then I had a chance
to see it better — a wonderful face, full of
Brofher wnims and drollery, with a white ring about
its pointed muzzle, and a dark line running
from the top of its nose and spreading into
ebony rings around each eye, as if he were
wearing queer smoked goggles, behind which
the eyes twinkled and shone, or grew sober
with much gravity as he heard the duck
quacking. A keen face, yet very innocent, in
which dog intelligence and fox cunning and
bear drollery mingled perfectly; a face full
of surprises, that set you smiling and think-
ing at once; a fascinating, inquisitive face,
the most lovable and contradictious among
the Wood Folk, — the face of Mooweesuk the
coon, the Little Brother to the Bear, as Indian
and naturalist unite in calling him.

The mother came out first and sagged
away backwards down the tree, swinging her
head from side to side to look down and see
how far yet, in true bear fashion. The four
little ones followed her, clawing and whining
their way to the bottom — all but one, who
when half-way down turned and jumped,

The little ones came out of their den
and began playing together"

landing on his mother's soft back to save
himself trouble. Then she led the way to

the doorway among the rocks, and the young

followed in single file, winding about on her '° .71*^ &Gdr

trail, stopping and sniffing when she did, and ^L • O
imitating her every action, just as young bear
cubs do when roaming about the woods.

At the mouth of the den she stepped aside,
and the young filed in out of sight one after
another. The mother looked and listened
for a moment, then scuttled away through
the woods as a clear tremulous whinny came
floating in through the twilight. A moment
later I saw her on the shore of the pond with
a larger coon, her mate probably, who had
been asleep in another hollow tree by him-
self; and the two went off along the shore
frogging and fishing together.

The mother had scarcely disappeared
when the little ones came out of their den
and began playing together, rolling and tum-
bling about like a litter of fox cubs, doing
it for fun purely, yet exercising every claw
and muscle for the hard work that a coon
must do when he is called upon to take care

of himself. After a time one of the cubs
left his brothers playing and went back to
tfjllfle Brother tiie chestnut tree by the same way that he
hac} C0me, following every turn and winding
of the back trail as if there were a path there
— as there probably was, to his eyes and nose,
though mine could not find any. He climbed
the tree as if he were after something, and
disappeared into the knot hole, where I could
hear the little fellow whining and scratching
his way down inside the tree. In a moment
he reappeared with something in his mouth.
In the dusk I could not make out what it
was, but as he came back and passed within
ten feet of where I was hiding I had my
field-glasses upon him and saw it plainly
— a little knot of wood with a crook in
it, the solitary plaything which you will
find, all smooth from much handling, in
almost every house where the Little Brother
to the Bear has lived.

He carried it back to where the young
coons were playing, lay down among them,
and began to play by himself, passing the play-
thing back and forth through his wonderful

front paws, striking it up, catching it, and

rolling it around his neck and under his

body, as a child does who has but one play- tfMfffe Brother

thing. Some of the other coons joined him, ^

and the little crooked knot went whirling

back and forth between them, was rolled and

caught, and hidden and found again, — all

in silent intentness and with a pleasure that

even in the twilight was unmistakable.

In the midst of this quiet play there came
a faint ripple and splash of water, and the little
coons dropped their plaything and stood listen-
ing, eyes all bright behind their dark goggles,
noses wiggling, and ears cocked at the plash-
ing on the pond shore. The mother was there
diligently sousing something that she had
caught ; and presently she appeared and the
little ones forgot their play in the joy of eating.
But it was too far away and the shadows were
now too dark to see what it was that she had
brought home, and how she divided it among
them. When she went away again it had grown
dark enough for safety, and the young followed
her in single file to the pond shore, where I
soon lost them among the cool shadows.

26

tfjjttle Brother
To

That was the beginning of a long acquaint-
ance, cultivated sometimes by day, more often
bv night; sometimes .alone, when I would
catch one of the family fishing or clamming
or grubbing roots or nest robbing ; sometimes
with a boy, who caught two of the family in
his traps ; and again with the hunters under
the September moon, when some foxy old
coon would gather a freebooter band about
him and lead them out to a raid on the corn-
fields. There each coon turned himself
promptly into an agent of destruction and,
reveling in the unwonted abundance, would
pull down and destroy like a child savage,
and taste twenty milky ears of corn before
he found one that suited him perfectly; and
then, too full for play or for roaming about
to find all the hollow trees in the woods, he
would take himself off to the nearest good
den and sleep till he was hungry again and
the low whinny of the old leader called him
out for another raid.

Could we have followed the family on this
first night of their wanderings, before the
raids began and the dogs had scattered them,

we would have understood why Mooweesuk

is called a brother to the bear. Running he

steps on his toes like a dog; and anatom- y/j(lifi€ 2jfOfner

ically, especially in the development of the <*°7™i Bear

skull and ear bones, he suggests the pre-
historic ancestor of both dog and wolf; but
otherwise he is a pocket-edition of Mooween
in all his habits. The .mother always leads,
like a bear, and the little ones follow in single
file, noting everything that the mother calls
attention to. They sit on their haunches
and walk flat-footed, like a bear, leaving a
track from their hind feet like that of a dwarf
baby. Everything eatable in the woods min-
isters to their hunger, as it does to that of
the greedy prowler in the black coat. Now
they stir up an ant's nest ; now they grub into
a rotten log for worms and beetles. If they
can find sweet sap, or a bit of molasses in an
old camp, they dip their paws in it and then
lick them clean, as Mooween does. They hunt
now for wintergreen berries, and now for a
woodmouse. They find a shallow place in
the brook when the suckers are running and
wait there till the big fish go by, when they

28

flip them out with their paws and scramble
after them. From this fishing they turn to
\us\i water-grass, or to digging frogs and
turtles out of the mud. and the turtle's shell
is cracked by dropping a stone upon it. Now
they steal into the coop and scuttle away with
a chicken ; and after eating it they come back
to the garden to crack a pumpkin open and
make a dessert of the seeds. Now they see
a muskrat swimming by in the pond with a
mussel in his mouth, and they follow after
him along the bank; for Musquash has a
curious habit of eating in regular places —
a flat rock, a stranded log, a certain tussock
from which he has cut away the grass —
and will often gather half a dozen or more
clams and mussels before he sits down to
dine. Mooweesuk watches till he finds the
place; then, while Musquash is gone away
after more clams, he will run off
with all that he finds on the
dining table. A score of times,
on the ponds and streams, I
have read the record of this
little comedy. You can always

tell the place where Musquash eats by the

pile of mussel shells in the water below it;

and sometimes you will find Mooweesuk's ^Jlfffe Brother

track stealing down to the place, and if you '° 7

follow it you will find where he cracked the

clams that Musquash had gathered.

There is another way in which Moowee-
suk is curiously like a bear: he wanders very
widely, but he has regular beats, like Moo-
ween, and if not disturbed always comes back
with more or less regularity to any place
where you have once seen him, and comes
by the same unseen path. Like Mooween,
his knowledge of the woods is wide and accu-
rate. He knows — partly by searching them
out, and partly from his mother, who takes
him and shows him where they are — every
den and hollow tree that will shelter a coon
in times of trouble. He has always one den
near a cornfield, where he can sleep when too
full or too lazy to travel ; he has one dry tree
for stormy weather, and one cool mossy shell
in deep shadow for the hot summer days. He
has at least one sunny nook in the top of a
hollow stub, where he loves to lie and soak

in the fall sunshine; and one favorite giant
tree with the deepest and warmest hollow,
jfljutie Brofner wnich he invariably uses for his long winter
sieept And besides all these he has at least
one tower of refuge near every path of his, to
which he can betake himself when sudden
danger threatens from dogs or men.

Though he walks and hunts and fights
and feeds like a bear, Mooweesuk has many
habits of his own that Mooween has never
approached. One of these is his habit of
nest robbing. Mooween does that, to be sure,
for he is fond of eggs ; but he must confine
himself largely to ground-birds and to nests
that he can reach by standing on his hind
legs. Therefore are the woodpeckers all safe
from him. Mooweesuk, on his part, can never
see a hole in a tree without putting his nose
into it to find out whether it contains any
eggs or young woodpeckers. If it does con-
tain them, he will reach a paw down, clinging
close to the tree and stretching and pushing
his arm into the hole clear to his shoulder, to
see if perchance the nest be not a foolishly
shallow one and the eggs lie within reach of

his paw — which suggests a monkey's, by the
way, in its handlike flexibility.

Once, on the edge of a wild orchard, I saw
him rob a golden- winged woodpecker's nest in
this way. The mother bird flew out as Moo-
weesuk came scratching up the tree, which
assured him that he would find something
worth while within. He stretched in a paw,
caught an egg, and appeared to be rolling it
up, holding it against the side of the tunnel.
When the egg was almost up to the entrance
he put in his nose to see the treasure. Then
it slipped and fell back, and probably broke.
He tried another, got it up safely, and ate it
whole where he was. He tried a third, which
slipped and broke like the first. At this, with
the taste of fresh egg in his mouth, he seemed
to grow impatient, or perhaps he got an idea
from the yellow streaks on his claws. He
jabbed his paw down hard to break all the
eggs, and drew it up dripping. He licked it
clean with his tongue and put it back again
into the yellow mess at the bottom. This
\vas easy, and he kept it up until his moist
paw brought up only shells and rotten wood,

when he backed away down the tree and
shuffled off into the woods, leaving a sad
jvj///f/e Brofner mess for a mother woodpecker to face
behind him.

Another habit in which he has improved
upon Mooween is his fishing. He knows
how to flip fish out of water with his paw, as
all bears do ; but he has also learned how to
attract them when they are not to be found
on the shallows. Many times in the twilight
I have found Mooweesuk sitting very still on
a rock or gray log beside the pond or river,
his soft colors and his stillness making him
seem like part of the shore. Other natural-
ists and hunters have mentioned the same
thing, and their testimony generally agrees
in this : that Mooweesuk's eyes are half shut
at such times, and his sensitive feelers, or
whiskers, are playing on the surface of the
water. The fish below, seeing this slight
motion but not seeing the animal above,
attracted either by curiosity or, more likely,
by the thought of insects playing, rise to the
surface and are snapped out by a sweep of
Mooweesuk's paw.

In a lecture, many years ago, Dr. Samuel
Lockwood, a famous naturalist, first called
attention to this curious way of angling.
Since then I have many times seen Moo-
\veesuk at his fishing ; but I have never been
fortunate enough to see him catch anything,
though I have seen a wildcat do the trick
perfectly in the same cunning way. Remem-
bering his fondness for fish, and the many
places where I have seen that he has eaten
them and where the water was too deep to
flip them out in the ordinary bear way, I
have no doubt whatever that Dr. Lockwood
has discovered the true secret of his patient
waiting above the pools where the fish are
feeding.

There is another curious habit of the coon
which distinguishes him from the bear and
from all other animals. That is, his habit of
washing, or rather of sousing, everything he
catches in water. No matter what he finds
to eat, — mice, chickens, roots, grubs, fruit —
everything, in fact, but fish, — he wrill take it
to water, if he be anywhere near a pond or
brook, and souse it thoroughly before eating.

34

Why he does this is largely a matter of guess-
work. It is not to clean it, for much of it is
Brofher alrea(jy clean ; not to soften it, for clams are
soft enough as they are, and his jaws are pow-
erful enough to crush the hardest shells, yet
he souses them just the same before eating.
Possibly it is to give things the watery taste
of fish, of which he is very fond ; more prob-
ably it is a relic, like the dog's turning around
before he lies down, or like the unnecessary
migration of most birds, the inheritance from
some forgotten ancestor that had a reason for
the habit, and that lived on the earth long,
long years before there was any man to watch
him or to wonder why he did it.

Deep in the wilderness Mooweesuk is shy
and alert for danger, like most of the wild
things there ; but if approached very quietly,
or if he find you unexpectedly near him, he
is filled with the Wood Folk's curiosity to
know who you are. Once, on the long tote-
road from St. Leonards to the headwaters of
the Restigouche, I saw Mooweesuk sitting on
a rock by a trout brook diligently sousing
something that he had just caught. I crept

near on all fours to the edge of an old
bridge, when the logs creaked under my
weight and he looked up from his washing 3%/lff/€ orofner

and saw me. He left his catch- on the ~

instant and came up the brook, part wading,
part swimming, put his forepaws on the low
bridge, poked his head up over the edge, and
looked at me steadily, his face within ten
feet of mine. He disappeared after a few
moments and I crawled to the edge of the
bridge to see what it was that he was wash-
ing. A faint scratching made me turn
round, and there he was, his paws up on the
other edge of the bridge, looking back at the
queer man-thing that he had never seen
before. He had passed under the bridge to
look at me from the other side, as a fox
invariably does if you keep still enough.
The game that he was washing was a big
frog, and after a few moments he circled the
bridge, grabbed his catch, and disappeared
into the woods.

Near towns where he is much hunted
Mooweesuk has grown wilder, like the fox,
and learned a hundred tricks that formerly

he knew nothing about. Yet even here, if
found young, he shows a strange fearlessness
si Jiftle Brother ancj even a rare confidence in man. Once,
m t]ie ea.rly summer, I found a young coon
at the foot of a ledge, looking up at a shelf
a few feet above his head and whimpering
because he could not get up. It was a sur-
prise to him, evidently, that his claws could
not make the same impression on the hard
rock that they did on the home tree in which
he was born. He made no objection —
indeed, he seemed to take it as the most
natural thing in the world — when I picked
him up and put him on the shelf that he
was whimpering about ; but in a moment,
like a baby, he wanted to get down again,
and again I ministered to his necessities.
When I went away he followed after me
whimpering, forgetting his own den and his
fellows in the ledge hard by, and was not
satisfied till I took him up, when he curled
down in the hollow of my arm and went to
sleep perfectly contented.

Presently he waked up, cocking his ears
and twisting his head dog fashion at some

sound that was too faint for my ears, and
poked his inquisitive nose all over me, even
putting it down inside my collar, where it
felt like a bit of ice creeping about my neck.
Not till he had clawed his way inside my
coat and put his nose in my vest pocket did
he find the cause of the mysterious sounds
which he heard. It was my watch ticking,
and in a moment he had taken it out and was
playing with the bright thing, as pleased as
a child with a new plaything. He made a
famous pet, full of tricks and drollery, catch-
ing chickens by pretending to be asleep
when they came stretching their necks for
the crumbs in his dish, playing possum when
he was caught in mischief, drinking out of a
bottle, full of joy when he could follow the
boys to the woods, where he ran wild with
delight but followed them home at twilight,
and at last going off by himself to his home
tree to sleep away the winter — but I must
tell about all that elsewhere;

Like the bear, Mooweesuk is a peaceable
fellow and tends strictly to his own affairs
as he wanders wide through the woods.

37

To The^Bear

462557

This is not from fear, for no animal, except
perhaps the wolverine — who is a terrible
™ F beast — is more careless of danger or faces
it with such coolness and courage when it
appears. Of a dog or two he takes little
heed. If he hear them on his trail, he gener-
ally climbs a tree to get out of the way ; for
your dog, unlike his wild brother, the wolf,
is a meddlesome fellow and must needs be
worrying everything; and Mooweesuk, like
most other wild creatures, loves peace, hunts
only when hungry, and would always prefer
to avoid a row if possible. When caught on
the ground, or cornered, or roused to action
by a sudden attack, he backs up against the
2- nearest tree or stone to keep his enemies
from getting at him from behind, and then
fights till he is dead or till none of his ene-
mies are left to bother him, when he goes
quietly on his way again. No matter how
great the odds or how terribly he is punished,
I have never seen a coon lose his nerve or
turn his back to run away. If the dogs be
many and he is near a pond or river, he will
lead them into deep water, where he is at

home, and then swimming rapidly in circles
will close with them one by one and put
them out of the fight most effectively. His
method here seldom varies. He will whirl
in suddenly on the dog that he has singled
out, grip him about the neck with one arm,
saw away at his head with his powerful teeth,
at the same time slashing him across the
eyes with his free claws, and then pile his
weight on the dog's head to sink him under
and drown all the rest of the fight out of him.
That is generally enough for one dog; and
Mooweesuk, without a scratch and with his
temper cool as ice, will whirl like a flash upon
his next victim.

Fortunately such troublous times are rare
in Mooweesuk's life, and the wilderness coon
knows little about them. His life from
beginning to end is generally a peaceable one,
full of good things to eat, and of sleep and
play and a growing knowledge of the woods.
He is born in the spring, a wee, blind, hair-
less little fellow, like a mole or a bear cub.
As he grows he climbs to the entrance to his
den, and will sit there as at a window for

To

hours at a time, just his nose and eye visible,
looking out on the new, bright, rustling
world of woods, and blinking sleepily in the
flickering sunshine. Then come the long
excursions with his mother, at first by day
when savage beasts are quiet, then at twi-
light, and then at last the long night rambles,
in which, following his leader, he learns a
hundred things that a coon must know: to
follow the same paths till he comprehends
the woods ; to poke his inquisitive nose into
every crack and cranny, for the best morsels
on his bill of fare hide themselves in such
places; to sleep for a little nap when he is
tired, resting on his forehead so as to hide
his brightly marked face and make himself
inconspicuous, like a rock or a lichen-covered
stump; to leap down from the tallest tree
without hurting himself ; and when he uses
a den in the earth or rocks, to have an exit
some distance away from the entrance, and
never under any circumstances to enter his
den save by his front door. There is great
wisdom in this last teaching. When a dog
finds a hole with a trail that always leads out

of it he goes away, knowing it is of no
use to bark there ; but when he finds an
opening into which a trail is leading, he
thinks of course that his game is inside, and
proceeds to howl and to dig without ever a
thought in his foolish head that there may
be another way out. Meanwhile, as he digs
and raises an unpardonable row in the quiet
woods, Mooweesuk will either wait just
inside the entrance till she gets a chance to
nip the dog's nose or crush his paw, or else
will slip quietly out of the back door with
her little ones and take them off to a hollow
tree where they can sleep in peace and have
no fear till the dog goes away.

By the time the first snows blow the little
coons are well grown and strong enough to
take good care of themselves ; and then, like
the bear again, they escape the cold and the
hunger of winter by going to sleep for four
or five months in a warm den that they have
selected carefully during their summer wan-
derings. They are fat as butter when they
curl themselves up for their long sleep ; their
ringed tails cover their sensitive

* oear

42

noses, and if they waken for a time they suck
their paws drowsily till they sleep again, so
tfJUfk ftrofher that, like the bear, they are often tender-footed
when they come out in the spring.

Often the young coons of the same family
sleep all together in the same den. The old
males prefer to den by themselves, and are
easily found; but the mother coon, like the
mother bear, takes infinite pains to hide
herself away where she can bring forth her
young in peace, and where no one will ever
find them.

There is one curious habit suggested by
these winter dens that I have never seen
explained, and for which I cannot account
satisfactorily. On certain soft days in winter
Mooweesuk wakes from his long sleep and
wanders off into the world. At times you
may follow his track for miles through the
woods without finding that he goes anywhere
or does anything in particular, for I have
never found that he has eaten anything on
these wanderings. Sometimes, miles away
from his den, his track turns aside and goes
straight to a hollow tree where other coons

are spending the winter. It may possibly be
that they are his own family, who generally
have a den of their own, and whom he visits
to see if all is well. Sometimes from this
den another coon goes out with him, and
their tracks wander for miles together ; more
often he comes out alone, and you follow to
where he has visited other coons, or gone
to sleep in another tree of his own, or swung
round in a vast circle to the tree from which
he started, where he goes to sleep again till
called out for another season by the spring
sun and the chickadee's love notes.

It may be that all this is a bit of pure
sociability on Mooweesuk's part, for it is
certainly not his season of love-making or
of finding a mate. Often, as I have said,
three or four cubs \vill sleep the winter out in
the same den; but again you may find two
or three old coons in the same tree. Unlike
many other animals with regard to their
dens, the law of hospitality is strong with
the coon, and a solitary old fellow that pre-
fers to den by himself will never refuse to
share his winter house with other coons that

43

44

are driven out of their snug shelter; and this
holds true notwithstanding the fact that there
jflji/fle Brofher are plenty other hollow trees that seem to
belong to the tribe in general, for they are
visited freely by every passing coon.

There is another way in which this love
of his race is manifest, and it brings a thrill
of admiration for Mooweesuk whenever it is
seen : he always comes in the face of danger
or death to the cry of distress from one of
his own kind. I have seen this several times,
and once when it gave a thrill to the wild
sport of night hunting that had unexpected
consequences. It was near midnight in late
November, at the end of the hunting season.
The dogs had treed a coon, and by the aid
of a bright fire of crackling brush we were
trying to "shine his eye," that is, to locate
the game in the tree-tops by the fierce glow
of his eyes flashing back the firelight. We
saw it at last, and one of the hunters climbed
the tree and tried to poke the coon from his
perch with a stout pole. Instead of doing
as was expected of him, Mooweesuk, who is
always cool in the face of any danger, came

Leaping out of the tree-top and hurling
himself into the fight "

swiftly along the limb showing his teeth, and
with a snarl in his nose that was unmistak-
able. The hunter dropped his pole, pulled a
revolver from his pocket and shot the coon,
which in a sudden rage turned and leaped for
the howling dogs forty feet below. In a flash
there was a terrible fight on. Mooweesuk,
backed up against a tree, began the cool
swift snaps and blows that took all the cour-
age out of half his enemies. Now a dog was
disabled by a single wolf grip on his sensitive
nose ; now a favorite drew back howling, half-
blinded by a lightning sweep of Mooweesuk's
paw across both eyes. But the dogs were
too many for any one fighter however brave.
They leaped in upon Mooweesuk from the
sides ; two powerful dogs stretched him out ;
then, knowing that his fight was almost lost,
he twisted his head and gave a sudden fierce
cry, the help call, entirely different from his
screech and snarl of battle. Like a flash
another coon, a young one, appeared on the
scene, leaping out of the tree-top and hurling
himself into the fight, clawing and snapping
like a fury, and sending out his battle yell.

48

Up to that moment none of us had sus-

pected that there was a second coon any-
Jijiffle Brother where near. He had remained hidden and

•70 The *^B

safe in the tree-top through all the uproar,
until what seemed plainly a call for help
came, when he threw all thought of self aside
and came down like a hero.

We had not half realized all this when
the little fellow threw himself upon the dog
that held the first coon's neck and crushed a
paw with a single grip of his powerful jaws.
Then the bigger coon \vas on his feet again
fighting feebly. — But a curious change had
come over the hunt. I had jumped forward
to interfere at the unexpected heroism, but
had drawn back at the thought that I was
only a guest, and there by courtesy. Near
me stood a big hunter, an owner of some of
the dogs, whose face was twitching strangely
in the firelight. He started for the fight
swinging a club, then drew back ashamed
to show any \veak sentiment in a coon hunt.
"Save him," I whispered in his ear, "the
little fellow deserves his life " ; and again he
jumped forward. " Drag off the dogs ! " he

roared in a terrible voice, at the same time
pulling away his own.' Every hunter under-
stood. There was a sudden wild yell with a
thrill in it that made one's spine tingle glori-
ously. The dogs were dragged away by tails
and legs, struggling and howling against the
indignity; the big coon lay down quietly to
die; but the little fellow put his back up
against a rock, his eyes glowing like coals
that the wind blows upon, wrinkled his
nose like a wolf, and snarled his defiance
at the whole howling mob. And there
he stayed till I took a pole and amid
laughs and cheers drove him, still pro-
testing savagely, into another tree where
the dogs could not get at him.

That was far a\vay from the place
where my first Little Brother to the Bear
lived, and many years had passed since
I had visited the ledge by the old beaver
dam. One day I came back, and turned
swiftly into the old wood road that had a
happy memory for me by every turn and
rock and moldering stump. Here was

49

where the grouse used to drum ; and there,
at the end of the log, 'were signs to tell me
tfJHtle fimfhef that it still sometimes rolled off the muffled
thunder of the wings above. Here was the
break in the wall that the fox used as a run-
way; and there -was a crinkly yellow hair
caught on a rough rock telling its story
mutely. Here was where the pines stood
thickest; but they were all cut away now,
and the hardwood seeds that had waited so
many years under the pines for their chance
at the sunlight were shooting up into vigor-
ous life at last. And here was the place
where the road twisted about to look back
on the pretty spot where the shy children
lived, with whom I had once made friends.

They were all gone, and the little house
under the ledge was deserted. In one of the
tumble-down rooms I found a rag doll beside
the cold hearth, and some poor toys on a shelf
under a broken window. In the whole lonely
forgotten house these were the only things
that brought the light to one's face and the
moisture to his eyes as he beheld them. All
else spoke of ruin and decay ; but these poor

playthings that little hands had touched went
straight to the heart with an eternal suggest-
ing of life and innocence and a childhood that
never grows old in the world. I dusted them
tenderly with my handkerchief and put them
back in their places, and went away softly
down the path that led to the other house
where the Little Brother to the Bear used
to live.

Everything was changed here, too. The
dam that the beavers had built, and that the
years had covered over, still stood as strong
as ever; but the woods had been cut away,
and the pond had dwindled till the wild duck
no longer found a refuge there. The ledges
were no longer green, for the sun that came in
when the big trees fell had killed most of the
mosses and ferns that decked them; and the
brook's song, though cheery still, was scarcely
heard as it trickled and seeped where once
it had rushed and tumbled down the woodsy
valley, which remained woodsy still, because
happily the soil there was too poor to raise
anything but brush and cowslips, and so the
woodsmen had spared it from desolation.

The old tree that had once been the coon's
house was blown down. When it missed the
tf^Jtffte BivfAer support and the wind-break of its fellows, it
could not stand alone, and toppled over in the
first storm. The old claw marks of Moowee-
suk were hidden deep under lichens. From
this ruined home I went to the den among
the rocks by the path that the coons used to
follow. The hunters had been here long ago ;
the den was pried open, the sheltering rocks
were thrust aside, and the interior was full
of last year's leaves. As I brushed them away
sadly to see what the house was like, my hand
struck something hard in a dark corner, and
I brought it out into the light again. It was
a little knot with a crook in it, all worn smooth
by much handling — the plaything that I had
first seen, and that was now the last mem-
ory of a home where the Little Brothers to
the Bear had once lived and played together
happily.

HITOOWEEK, the wood-
cock, the strangest hermit
in all the woods, is a bird
of mystery. Only the hunters know any-
thing about him, and they know him chiefly
as a glorious bird that flashes up to the alder
tops with a surprised twitter before their
dogs, and poises there a moment on whirring
wings to get his bearings, and then from his
vantage-point at the moment of his exulta-
tion he either falls down dead at the bang
of their guns and the rip of shot through
the screen of leaves, or else happily he slants

swiftly down to another hiding-place among
the alders. To the hunters, who are practi-
caUy his onjy human acquaintances, he is a
game bird pure and simple, and their interest
is chiefly in his death. The details of his
daily life he hides from them, and from all
others, in the dark woods, where he spends
all the sunny hours, and in the soft twilight
when he stirs abroad, like an owl, after his
long day's rest. Of a hundred farmers on
whose lands I have found Whitooweek or the
signs of his recent feeding, scarcely five knew
from observation that such a bird existed, so
well does he play the hermit under our very
noses.

The reasons for this are many. By day
he rests on the ground in some dark bit of
cover, by a brown stump that exactly matches
his feathers, or in a tangle of dead leaves
and brakes \vhere it is almost impossible to
see him. At such times his strange fearless-
ness of man helps to hide him, for he will
let you pass within a few feet of him without
stirring. That is partly because he sees
poorly by day and perhaps does not realize

how near you are, and partly because he
knows that his soft colors hide him so well
amidst his surroundings that you cannot see
him, however near you come. This conn-
dence of his is well placed, for once I saw a
man step over a brooding woodcock on her
nest in the roots of an old stump without
seeing her, and she never moved so much as
the tip of her long bill as he passed. In the
late twilight when woodcock first stir abroad
you see only a shadow passing swiftly across
a bit of clear sky as Whitooweek goes off to
the meadow brook to feed, or hear a rustle
in the alders as he turns the dead leaves over,
and a faint peeunk, like the voice of a distant
night-hawrk, and then you catch a glimpse of
a shadow that flits along the ground, or a
weaving, batlike flutter of wings as you draw
near to investigate. No wonder, under such
circumstances, that Whitooweek passes all
his summers and raises brood upon brood of
downy invisible chicks in a farmer's wood lot
without ever being found out or recognized.

My own acquaint-
ance with Whitooweek

began when I was a child, when I had no
name to give the strange bird that I watched
day after day, and when those whom I asked
for information laughed at my description
and said no such bird existed. It was just
beyond the upland pasture where the famous
Old Beech Partridge lived. On the northern
slopes were some dark, wet maple woods, and
beyond that the ground slanted away through
scrub and alders to a little wild meadow
where cowslips grew beside the brook. One
April day, in stealing through the maple
woods, I stopped suddenly at seeing some-
thing shining like a jewel almost at my feet.
It was an eye, a bird's eye ; but it was some
moments before I could realize that it was
really a bird sitting there on her nest between
the broken ends of an old stub that had fallen
years ago.

I backed away quietly and knelt down to
watch the queer find. Her bill was enormously
long and straight, and
her eyes were 'way up

'!6SOSJ

/^t+.^t^? N-

at the back of her head — that was the first

59
observation. Some wandering horse had put

his hoof down and made a hollow in the
dry rotten wood of the fallen stub. Into
this hollow a few leaves and brown grass
stems had been gathered, — a careless kind
of nest, yet serving its purpose wonderfully,
for it hid the brooding mother so well that
one might step on her without ever knowing
that bird or nest was near. This was the
second wondering observation, as I made out
the soft outlines of the bird sitting there,
apparently without a thought of fear, within
ten feet of my face.

I went away quietly that day and left her
undisturbed; and I remember perfectly that
I took with me something of the wonder,
and something too of the fear, with which a
child naturally meets the wild things for the
first time. That she should be so still and
fearless before me was a perfect argument to
a child that she had some hidden means of
defense — the long bill, perhaps, or a hidden
sting — with which it was not well to trifle.
All that seems very strange and far away to

£ me now ; but it was real enough then to a
very small boy, alone in the dark woods,

who met for the first t-me a large bird with

an en0rmously long bill and eyes 'way up on
the back of her head where they plainly did
not belong, a bird moreover that had no fear
and seemed perfectly well able to take care
of herself. So I went away softly and won-
dered about it.

Next day I came back again. The
strange bird was there on her nest as be-
fore, her long bill resting over the edge of
the hollow and looking like a twig at the
first glance. She showed no fear whatever,
and encouraged at her quietness and assur-
ance I crept nearer and nearer till I touched
her bill with my finger and turned it gently
aside. At this she wiggled it impatiently,
and my first child's observation was one that
has only recently been noticed by natural-
ists, namely, that the tip of the upper bill
is flexible and can be moved about almost
like* the tip of a finger in order to find the
food that lies deep in the mud, and seize
it and drag it out of its hiding. At the

same time she uttered a curious hissing ,
sound that frightened me again and made
me think of snakes and hidden stings; so
I drew back and watched her from a safe
distance. She sat for the most part per-
fectly motionless, the only movement being
an occasional turning of the long bill ; and
once when she had been still a very long
time, I turned her head aside again, and to
my astonishment and delight she made no
objection, but left her head as I had turned
it, and presently she let me twist it back
again. After her first warning she seemed
to understand the situation perfectly, and
had no concern for the wondering child that
watched her and that had no intention what-
ever of harming her or her nest. ^JJ^y^

Others had laughed at my
description of a brown bird with
a long bill and eyes at the back
of her head that let you touch her on her
nest, so I said no more to them ; but at the
first opportunity I hunted up Natty Dingle
and told him all about it. Natty was a
gentle, harmless, improvident little man, who

, would never do any hard work for pay, — it
gave him cricks in his back, he said, — but
would cheerfully half kill himself to go fish-
ing through the ice, or to oblige a neigh-
bor. So far as he earned a living he did it
by shooting and fishing and trapping and
picking berries in their several seasons, and
by gathering dandelions and cowslips (kew-
slops he called them) in the spring and
peddling them good-naturedly from door to
door. Most of his time in pleasant weather
he spent in roaming about the woods, or
lying on his back by the pond shore where
the woods were thickest, fishing lazily and
catching fish where no one else could ever
get them, or watching an otter's den on a
stream where no one else had seen an otter
for forty years. He knew all about the woods,
knew every bird and beast and plant, and one
boy at least, to my knowledge, would rather
go with him for a day's fishing than see the
president's train or go to a circus.
Unlike the others, Natty did
not laugh at my description, but
listened patiently and told me I

had found a woodcock's nest, — a rare thing,
he said, for though he had roamed the woods
so much, and shot hundreds of the birds
in season, he had never yet chanced upon a
nest. Next day he went with me, to see the
eggs, he said ; but, as I think of it now, it was
probably with a view of locating the brood
accurately for the August shooting. As we
rounded the end of the fallen stub the wood-
cock's confidence deserted her at sight of the
stranger, and she slipped away noiselessly into
the leafy shadows. Then we saw her four
eggs, very big at one end, very little at the
other, and beautifully colored and spotted.

Natty, who was wise in his way, merely
glanced at the nest and then drew me aside
into hiding, and before wre knew it, or had
even seen her approach, Mother Woodcock
was brooding her eggs again. Then Natty,
who had doubted one part of my story, whis-
pered to me to go out; and the bird never
stirred as I crept near on hands and knees
and touched her as before.

A few minutes later we crept away softly,
and Natty took me to the swamp to show

me the borings, telling me on the way of the
woodcock's habits as he had seen them in
the fall hunting. The borings we found in
plenty wherever the earth was soft, — numer-
ous holes, as if made with a pencil, where
the woodcock had probed the earth with
her long bill. She was hunting for earth-
worms, Natty told me, — a queer mistake of
his, and of all the bird books as well, for
in the primitive alder woods and swamps
where the borings are so often seen, there
are no earthworms, but only slugs and soft
beetles and delicate white grubs. Wood-
cock hunt by scent and feeling, and also by
listening for the slight sounds made by the
worms underground, he told me,
and that is

why the eyes are far back on the head, to be
out of the way, and also to watch for danger
above and behind while the bird's bill is deep
in the mud. And that also explains why the
tip of the bill is flexible, so that when the
bird bores in the earth and has failed to locate
the game accurately by hearing, the sensitive
tip of the bill feels around, like a finger, until
it finds and seizes the morsel. All this and
many things more he told me as we searched
through the swamp for the signs of Mother
Woodcock's hunting and made our way home
together in the twilight. Some things were
true, some erroneous ; and some were a curious
blending of accurate traditions and imagina-
tive folk-lore from some unknown source,
such as is still held as knowledge of birds
and beasts in all country places ; and these
were the most interesting of all to a child.
And the boy listened, as a devotee listens to
a great sacred concert, and remembered all
these things and afterwards sifted them and
found out for himself what things were true.
When I went back to the spot, a few days
later, the nest was deserted. A few bits of

,,

shell scattered about told me the story, and

that I must now hunt for the little wood-
cocks> which are almost impossibie to find

uniess tjie mother herself show you where
they are. A week later, as I prowled along
the edge of the swamp, a sudden little brown
whirlwind seemed to roll up the leaves at
my feet. In the midst of it I made out
the woodcock fluttering away, clucking, and
trailing now a wing and now a leg, as if des-
perately hurt. Of course I followed her to
see what was the matter, forgetting the par-
tridge that had once played me the same
pretty trick to decoy me away from her
chicks. When she had led me to a safe
distance all her injuries vanished as at the
touch of magic. She sprang up on strong
wings, whirled across the swamp
and circled swiftly back

to wnere

started her. But I did not find one of the
little woodcocks, though I hunted for them
half an hour, and there were four of them,
probably, hiding among the leaves and grass
stems under my very eyes.

The wonderful knowledge gleaned from
Natty Dingle's store and from the borings
in the swamp brought me into trouble and
conflict a few weeks later. Not far from
me lived a neighbor's boy, a budding natu-
ralist, who had a big yellow cat named Blink
at his house. A queer old cat was Blink,
and the greatest hunter I ever saw. He
knew, for instance, where a mole could be
found in his long tunnel, — and that is some-
thing that still puzzles me, — and caught
scores of them ; but, like most cats, he could
never be induced to taste one. When he
caught a mole and was hungry, he would
hide it and go off to catch a mouse or a
bird; and these he would eat, leaving the
mole to be brought home as game. He
would hunt by himself for hours at a time,
and come meowing home, bringing every-
thing he caught, — rats, squirrels, rabbits,

68

quail, grouse, and even grasshoppers when
no bigger game was afoot. At a distance
we woul^ near njs ca\\^ a peculiar yeow-yow
that he gave only when he had caught some-
thing, and the boy would run out to meet
him and take his game, while Blink purred
and rubbed against his legs to show his pride
and satisfaction. When no one met him he
would go meowing round the house once or
twice and then put his game under the door-
step, where our noses must speedily call it
to our attention, for Blink \vould never touch
it again.

One day the boy found a strange bird un-
der the door-step, a beautiful brown creature,
as large as a pigeon, with a long, straight bill,
and eyes at the top of its head. He took it
to his father, a dogmatic man, who gave him
a queer mixture of truth and nonsense as his
portion of natural history. It was a blind
snipe, he said ; and there was
some truth in that.
It could n't see because
its eyes were out of
place; it was a very

scarce bird that appeared occasionally in the
fall, and that burrowed in the mud for the
winter instead of migrating, — and all this
was chiefly nonsense.

When the boy took me to see his queer
find I called it a woodcock and began to tell
about it eagerly, but was stopped short and
called a liar for my pains. A wordy war
followed, in which Natty Dingle's authority
was invoked in vain; and the boy, being
bigger than I and in his own yard, drove me
away at last for daring to tell him about a
bird that his own cat had caught and that
his own father had called a blind snipe. He
pegged one extra stone after me for saying
that there were plenty of them about, only
they fed by night like owls, and another
stone for shouting back that they did not
burrow in the mud like turtles in dry weather,
as his oracle had declared. And this untem-
pered zeal is very much like what one gener-
ally encounters when he runs up against the
prejudices of naturalists anywhere. Hear
all they say, — that the earth is flat, that
swallows spend the winter in the mud, that

animals are governed wholly by instinct, —
but don't quote any facts you may have seen
until the world is ready for them> For jt is

^g^er to call a thing a blind snipe, and know
better, than to raise a family row and be hit
on the head with a stone for calling it a
woodcock.

The little woodcocks, though scarcely big-
ger than bumblebees, run about hardily, like
young partridges, the moment they chip the
shell, and begin at once to learn from the
mother where to look for food. In the early
twilight, when they are less wild and the
mother is not so quick to flutter away and
draw you after her, I have sometimes sur-
prised a brood of them, — wee, downy, invis-
ible things, each with a comically long bill
and a stripe down his back that seems to
divide the little fellow and hide one half of
him even after you have discovered the other.
The mother is with them, and leads them
swiftly among the bogs and ferns and alder
stems, where they go about turning over the
dead leaves and twigs and shreds of wet
bark with their bills for the grubs that hide

beneath, like a family of rag-pickers each with
a little stick to turn things over. Mother
and chicks have a contented little twitter at
such times that I have never heard under
any other circumstances, which is probably
intended to encourage each other and keep
all the family within hearing as they run
about in the twilight.

When the feeding-grounds are far away
from the nest, as is often the case, Whitoo-
week has two habits that are not found, I
think, in any other game birds — except per-
haps the plover ; and 1 have never been able
to watch the young of these birds, though
every new observation of the old ones serves

to convince me that they are the most remark- )^f i

•ffli'

able birds that visit us, and the least under- ^Mtf™/K*

stood. When food must be hunted
for at a long distance, the mother
will leave her brood in hiding and
go herself to fetch it. When she
returns she feeds the chicks, like
a mother dove, by putting her bill
in their throats and giving each
his portion, going and coming

3>

until they are satisfied, when she leaves them
in hiding again and feeds for herself during
the rest of the night. Like most other young
birds and animals when left thus by their
mothers, they never leave the spot where
they have been told to stay, and can hardly
be driven away from it until the mother
returns. And generally, when you find a
brood of young woodcock without the mother,
they will let you pick them up and will lie as
if dead in your hand, playing possum, until
you put them down again.

When there is a good feeding-ground near
at hand, yet too far for the little chicks to
travel, the mother will take them there, one
by one, and hide them in a secret spot until
she has brought the whole family. Two or
three times I have seen woodcock fly away
with their young; and once I saw a mother
return to the spot from which, a few moments
before, she had flown away with a chick and
take another from under a leaf where I had
not seen him. This curious method is used
by the mothers not only to take the young
to favorable feeding-grounds, but also to get

them quickly out of the way when sudden
danger threatens, like fire or flood, from
which it is impossible to hide.

So far as I can judge the process, which
is always quickly done and extremely dim-
cult to follow, the mother lights or walks
directly over the chick and holds him be-
tween her knees as she flies. This is the
way it seems to me after seeing it several
times. There are those — and they are hunt-
ers and keen observers — who claim that
the mother carries them in her bill, as a cat
carries a kitten; but how that is possible
without choking the little fellows is to me
incomprehensible. The bill is not strong
enough at the tip, I think, to hold them by a
wing; and to grasp them by the neck, as in
a pair of shears, and so to carry them, would,
it seems to me, most certainly suffocate or
injure them in any prolonged flight; and
that is not the way in which wild mothers
generally handle their little ones.

There is another possible way in which
Whitooweek may carry her young, though I
have never seen it. An old hunter and keen

observer of wild life, with whom I some-
times roam the woods, once stumbled upon
a mother woodcock and her brood by a little
brook at the foot of a wild hillside. One of
the chicks was resting upon the mother's
back, just as one often sees a domestic
chicken. At my friend's sudden approach
the mother rose, taking the chick with her
on her back, and vanished among the thick
leaves. The rest of the brood, three of them,
disappeared instantly; and the man, after find-
ing one of them, went on his way without
waiting to see whether the mother returned
for the rest. I give the incident for what it
is worth as a possible suggestion as to the
way in which young woodcock are carried to
and fro; but I am. quite sure that those that
have come under my own observation were
carried by an entirely different method.

The young woodcock begin to use their
tiny wings within a few days of leaving the
eggs, earlier even than young quail, and fly
in a remarkably short time. They grow with
astonishing rapidity, thanks to their good
feeding, so that often by early summer the

One of the chicks was resting
upon the mother's back"

family scatters, each one to take care of him-
self, leaving the mother free to raise another
brood. At such times they travel widely in
search of favorite food and come often into
the farm-yards, spending half the night about
the drains and stables while the house is still,
and vanishing quickly at the first alarm ; so
that Whitooweek is frequently a regular visitor
in places where he is never seen or suspected.
In his fondness for earthworms Whitoo-
week long ago learned some things that a
man goes all his life without discovering,
namely, that it is much easier and simpler
to pick up worms than to dig for them.
When a boy has to dig bait, as the price of
going fishing with his elders, he will often
spend half a day, in dry weather, working
hard with very small results; for the worms
are deep in the earth at such times and can
be found only in favored places. Meanwhile
the father, who has sent his boy out to dig,
will spend a pleasant hour after supper in
watering his green lawn. The worms begin
to work their way up to the surface at the
first patter of water-drops, and by midnight

o are crawling about the lawn by hundreds,
big, firm-bodied fellows, just right for trout
fishing. They stay on the surface most of
the night; and that is why the early bird
catches the worm, instead of digging him
out, as the sleepy fellows must do. Mid-
night is the best time to go out with your
lantern and get all the bait you want with-
out trouble or worry. That is also the time
when you are most likely to find Whitoo-
week at the same occupation. Last summer
I flushed two woodcock from my neighbor's
lawn in the late evening ; and hardly a sum-
mer goes by that you do not read with won-
der of their being found within the limits
of a great city like New York, whither they
have come from a distance by night to hunt
the rich lawns over. For the same fare of
earthworms they visit the gardens as well;
and often in a locality where no woodcock
are supposed to exist you will find, under
the cabbage leaves, or in the cool shade of
the thick corn-field, the round holes where
Whitooweek has been probing the soft earth
for grubs and worms while you slept.

When midsummer arrives a curious
change comes over Whitooweek; the slight
family ties are broken, and the bird becomes
a hermit indeed for the rest of the year. He
lives entirely alone, and not even in the
migrating season does he join with his fel-
lows in any large numbers, as most other
birds do; and no one, so far as I know, has
ever seen anything that might be appro-
priately called a flock of woodcock. The
only exception to this rule that I know is
when, on rare occasions, you surprise a male
woodcock strutting on a log, like a grouse,
spreading wings and tail, and hissing and
sputtering queerly as he moves up and down.
Then, if you creep near, you will flush two
or three other birds that are watching
beside the log, or in the underbrush close
at hand. One hunter told me recently
that his setter once pointed a bird on a
fallen log, that ceased his strutting as
soon as he was discovered and slipped
down into the ferns. When the dog

drew nearer, five woodcock flushed at the

oO

same moment, the greatest number that I
jiave ever known being found together.

when l asked the uniearned hunter —
who was yet wise in the ways of the woods
— the reason for Whitooweek's strutting at
this season, after the families have scattered,
he had no theory or explanation. " Just a
queer streak, same 's most birds have, on'y
queerer," he said, and let it go at that. I
have seen the habit but once, and then
imperfectly, for I blundered upon t\vo or
three birds and flushed them before I could
watch the peiformance. It is certainly not
to win his mate, for the season for that is
long past; and unless it be a suggestion of
the grouse habit of gathering in small bands
for a kind of rude dance, I am at a loss to
account for it. Possibly play may appeal
even to Whitooweek, as it certainly appeals
to all other birds; and it is play alone that
can make him forget he is a hermit.

With the beginning of the molt the
birds desert the woods and swamps where
they were reared and disappear absolutely.

Whither they go at this time is a profound
mystery. In places where there were a
dozen birds yesterday there are none to-day;
and when you do stumble upon one it is
generally in a spot where you never found
one before, and where you will probably not
find another, though you haunt the spot for
years. This is the more remarkable in view
of the fact that the woodcock, like most other
birds, has certain favored spots to which he
returns, to nest or feed or sleep, year after year.
Occasionally at this season you may find
a solitary bird on a dry southern hillside, or
on the sunny edge of the big woods. He
is pitiful now to behold, having scarcely any
feathers left to cover him, and can only flut-
ter or run away at your approach. If you
have the rare fortune to surprise him now /
\vhen he does not see you, you will note a :
curious thing. He stands beside a
stump or brake where the sun can
strike his bare back
fairly, as if he were
warming himself at
nature's fireplace. His

8i

82

long bill rests its tip on the ground, as if it
were a prop supporting his head. He is
asleep; but if you crawl near and bring your
glasses to bear, you will find that he sleeps
with half an eye open. The lower lid seems
to be raised till it covers half the eye ; but the
upper half is clear, so that as he sleeps he
can watch above and behind for his enemies.
He gives out very little scent at such times,
and your keen-nosed dog, that
would wind him at a stone's
throw in the autumn, will
now pass close by with-
out noticing him, and
[must almost run over
the bird before he draws
to a point or shows any
signs that game
is near.

Hunters say that these scattered birds are
those that have lost the most feathers, and
that they keep to the sunny open spots for
the sake of getting warm. Perhaps they are
right; but one must still ask the question,
what do these same birds do at night when
the air is colder than by day ? And, as if to
contradict the theory, when you have found
one bird on a sunny open hillside, you will
find the next one a mile away asleep in the
heart of a big corn-field, where the sun barely
touches him the whole day long.

Whatever the reason for their action, these
birds that you discover in July are rare, in-
comprehensible individuals. The bulk of
the birds disappear, and you cannot find
them. Whether they scatter widely to dense
hiding-places and by sitting close escape dis-
covery, or whether, like some of the snipe,
they make a short northern migration in the
molting season in search of solitude and a
change of food, is yet to be discovered. For
it is astonishing how very little we know of
a bird that nests in our cow pasture and that
often visits our yards and lawns nightly, but

whose acquaintance we make only when he
is dead and served as a delicious morsel, hot
on toast, on our dining-tables.

In the spring, while winning his mate,
Whitooweek has one habit which, when seen
at the edge of the alder patch, reminds you
instantly of the grass-plovers of the open
moors and uplands, and of their wilder name-
sakes of the Labrador barrens. Indeed, in
his fondness for burned plains, where he can
hide in plain sight and catch no end of grass-
hoppers and crickets without trouble to vary
_.^ his diet, and in a swift
^i;g ;. changeableness and
fearlessness of man,
Whitooweek has
many points in common with the
almost unknown plovers. In the
dusk of the evening, as you steal
along the edge of the woods, you
£/ ", / "aft will hear a faint peenk,

peenk close beside you, and as you turn to
listen and locate the sound a woodcock slants
swiftly up over your head and begins to whirl

j L j o

in a spiral towards the heavens, clucking and
twittering ecstatically. It is a poor kind of
song, not to be compared with that of the oven-
bird or grass-plover, who do the same thing
at twilight, and Whitooweek must help his
voice by the clicking of his wings and by
the humming of air through them, like the
sharp voice of a reed in windy weather; but
it sounds sweet enough, no doubt, to the
little brown mate who is standing perfectly
still near you, watching and listening to the
performance. At an enormous height, for
him, Whitooweek whirls about madly for
a few moments and then retraces his spiral
downwards, clucking and twittering the while,
until he reaches the tree-tops, where he folds
his wings directly over his mate and drops
like a plummet at her head. Still she does
not move, knowing well what is coming, and
when within a few feet of the ground Whit-
ooweek spreads his wings wide to break his
fall and drops quietly close beside her. There

-|k;

he remains quite still for a moment, as if ex-
hausted ; but the next moment he is strut-
ting about her, spreading wings and tail like
a wild turkey-gobbler, showing all his good
points to the best advantage, and vain of all
his performances as a peacock in the spring
sunshine. Again he is quiet ; a faint peent,
peent sounds, as if it were a mile away ; and
again Whitooweek slants up on swift wings
to repeat his ecstatic evolutions.

Both birds are strangely fearless of men
at such times ; and if you keep still, or move
very softly if you move at all, they pay no
more attention to you than if you were one
of the cattle cropping the first bits of grass
close at hand. Like the golden plover,
whose life is spent mostly in the vast soli-
tudes of Labrador and Patagonia, and whose
nature is a curious mixture of extreme wild-
ness and dense stupidity, they seem to have
no instinctive fear of any large animal; and
whatever fear Whitooweek has learned is the
. result of persistent hunting. Even in
if^r~>- this he is slower to learn than any
> '^ $'i °^ier J?ame bird, and when let alone

l®Plfe^

,*>*i--C .

. 5S*A

for a little season promptly returns to his
native confidence.

When the autumn comes you will notice
another suggestion of the unknown plover em^Grm
in Whitooweek. Just as you look confi-
dently for the plover's arrival in the first
heavy northeaster after August 20, so the
first autumn moon that is obscured by heavy
fog will surely bring the woodcock back to
his accustomed haunts again. But why he
should wait for a full moon, and then for a
chill mist to cover it, before beginning his
southern flight is one of the mysteries. Un-
like the plovers that come by hundreds, and
whose eerie cry, shrilling above the roar of
the storm and the rush of rain, brings you
out of your bed at midnight to thrill and
listen and thrill again, Whitooweek slips in
silent and solitary; and you go out in the
morning, as to an appointment, and find him
sleeping quietly just w"here you expected him
to be.

With the first autumn flight another curi-
ous habit comes out, namely, that Whitoo-
week has a fondness for certain spots, not

for any food or protection they give him,
but evidently from long association, as a
chnd loves certain unkempt corners of an
Upian(j pasture above twenty other more
beautiful spots that one would expect him
to like better. Moreover, the scattered birds,
in some unknown way, seem to keep account
of the place, as if it were an inn, and so long
as they remain in the neighborhood will often
keep this one particular spot filled to its full
complement.

Some three miles north of where I write
there is a certain small patch of tall open
woods that a few hunters have known and
tended for years, while others passed by care-
lessly, for it is the least likely looking spot
for game in the whole region. Yet if there is
but a single woodcock in all Fairfield County,
in these days of many hunters and few birds,
the chances are that he will be there; and
if you do not find one there on the first
morning after a promising spell of weather,
you may be almost certain that the flight is
not yet on, or has passed you by. Several
times after flushing a solitary woodcock in

this spot I have gone over the whole place
to find some reason for Whitooweek's strange
fancy; but all in vain. The ground is open
and stony, with hardly a fern or root or
grass tuft to shelter even a woodcock; and
look as closely as you will you can find
no boring or sign of Whitooweek's feeding.
From all external appearances it is the last
spot where you would expect to find such a
bird, and there are excellent covers close at
hand; yet here is where Whitooweek loves
to lie during the day, and to this spot he
will return as long as there are any wood-
cock left. Hunters may harry the spot to-
day and kill the few rare birds that still visit
it; but to-morrow, if there be any birds in
the whole neighborhood, there will be prac-
tically the same number just where the first
were killed.

I have questioned old gunners about this
spot, — which I discovered by flushing two
woodcock at a time when none were to be
found, though they were searched for by a
score of young hunters and dogs, — and find
that it has been just so as long

as they can remember. Years ago, when the
birds were plenty and little known, five or
six might be found here on a half-acre at any

time during the flight If these were killed

off, others took their places, and the supply
seemed to be almost a constant quantity as
long as there were birds enough in the sur-
rounding coverts to draw upon; but why
they haunt this spot more than others, and
why the vacant places are so quickly filled,
are two questions that no man can answer.

One hunter suggests to me, doubtfully,
that possibly this may be accounted for by
the migrating birds that are moving south-
ward during the flight, and that drop into
the best unoccupied places; and the same
explanation will occur to others. The ob-
jection to this is that the birds migrate by
night, and by night this spot is always un-
occupied. The woodcock use it for a rest-
ing-place only by day, and by night they
scatter widely to the feeding-grounds, whither
also the migrating birds first make their way;
for Whitooweek must feed often, his food
being easily digested, and can probably make

no sustained flights. He seems to move
southward by easy stages, feeding as he
goes; and so the new-comers would meet
the birds that lately occupied the spot on
the feeding-grounds, if indeed they met them
at all, and from there would come with them
at daylight to the resting-places they had
selected. But how do the new-comers, who
come by night, learn that the favored spots
are already engaged by day, or that some
of the birds that occupied them yesterday
are now dead and their places vacant?

The only possible explanation is either
to say that it is a matter of chance —
which is no explanation at all, and fool-
ish also; for chance, if indeed there be
any such blind unreasonable thing in a
reasonable world, does not repeat itself
regularly — or to say frankly that there
is some definite understanding
and communication among the birds
as they flit to and fro in the night;
which is probably true, but obviously
impossible to prove with our present
limited knowledge.

This fondness for certain spots shows itself
in another way when you are on the trail of
the hermit. When flushed from a favorite
resting-place and not shot at, he makes but
a short flight, up to the brush tops and back
again, and then goes quietly back to the spot
from which he rose as soon as you are gone
away. He has also the hare trick of return-
ing in a circle to his starting-point ; and occa-
sionally, when you flush a bird and watch
sharply, you may see him slant down on
silent wings behind you and light almost at
your heels. Once my old dog Don started
a woodcock and remained stanchly point-
ing at the spot where he had been. I re-
mained where I was, a few yards in the rear,
and in a moment Whitooweek whirled in
from behind and dropped silently into some
brakes between me and the dog and not ten
feet from the old setter's tail. The ruse suc-
ceeded perfectly, for as the scent faded away
from Don's nose he went forward, and so
missed the bird that was watching him close
behind. This curious habit may be simply
the result of Whitooweek's fondness for

" Once my old dog Don started
a woodcock "

certain places ; or it may be that by night he
carefully selects the spot where he can rest
and hide during the day, and returns to it
because he cannot find another so good
while the sun dazzles his eyes; or it may
be a trick pure and simple to deceive the
animal that disturbs him, by lighting close
behind where neither dog nor man will ever
think of looking for him.

By night, when he sees perfectly and
moves about rapidly from one feeding-
ground to another, Whitooweek is easily
dazzled by a light of any kind, and he is
one of the many creatures that come and
go within the circle of your jack. Because
he is silent at such times, and moves swiftly,
he is generally unnamed — just a night bird,
you think, and let him pass without another
thought. Several times when jacking, to
see what birds and animals I might surprise
and watch by night, I have recognized Whit-
ooweek whirling wildly about my circle of
light. Once, deep in the New Brunswick
wilderness, I surprised two poachers spear-
ing salmon at midnight with a fire-basket

hung over the bow of their canoe. Spite
of its bad name it is a magnificent perform-
ance, skillful and daring beyond measure ; so
instead of driving them off I asked for a seat
in their long dugout to see how it was done.
As we swept up and down the dangerous
river, with pitch-pine blazing and cracking
and the black shadows jumping about us,
two woodcock sprang up from the shore
and whirled madly around the pirogue. One
brushed my face with his wings, and was
driven away only when Sandy in the bo\v
gave a mighty lunge of his spear and with
a howl of exultation flung a twenty-pound,
kicking salmon back into my lap. But sev-
eral times that night I saw the flash of their
wings, or heard their low surprised twitter
above the crackle of the fire and the rush
and roar of the rapids.

When he finds good feeding grounds on
his southern migrations Whitooweek will
stay with us, if undisturbed, until a sharp
frost seals up his store-
house by making the
ground too hard for his

sensitive bill to penetrate. Then he slips
away southward to the next open spring or
alder run. Not far away, on Shippan Point,
is a little spring that rarely freezes and whose
waters overflow and make a green spot even
in midwinter. The point is well covered
with houses now, but formerly it was good
woodcock ground, and the little spring always
welcomed a few of the birds with the wel-
come that only a spring can give. Last
year, at Christmas time, I found a woodcock
there quite at home, within a stone's throw
of two or three houses and with snow lying
deep all around him. He had lingered there
weeks after all other birds had gone, either
held by old associations and memories of
a time when only the woodcock knew the
place ; or else, wounded and unable to fly,
he had sought out the one spot in all the
region where he might live and be fed until
his wing should heal. Nature, whom men
call cruel, had cared for him tenderly, heal-
ing his wounds that man had given, and giv-
ing him food and a safe refuge at a time
when all other feeding-grounds were held

g fast in the grip of winter ; but men, who can
be kind and reasonable, saw no deep mean-
ing in it an. The day after I found him a
hunter passed that way, and was proud of
having killed the very last
woodcock of the season.

HERE is one astonishing thing about
Whitooweek which can scarcely be
called a habit, but which is probably the
discovery of one or two rare individuals
here and there more original than their fel-
lows. Like the eider-ducks and the bear
and the beaver, Whitooweek sometimes uses
a rude kind of surgery for binding up his

wounds. Twenty years ago, while sitting
quietly by a brook at the edge of the woods
in Bridgewater, a woodcock suddenly fluttered
open and made his way to a spot
on the bank where a light streak of sticky
mud and clay showed clearly from where I
was watching. It was the early hunting sea-
son and gunners were abroad in the land,
and my first impression was that this was a
wounded bird that had made a long flight
after being shot, and that had now come
out to the stream to drink or to
bathe his wound. Whether this
were so or not is a matter of guess-
work; but the bird was acting
strangely in broad daylight, and
I crept nearer till I could see him
plainly on the other side of the
little stream, though he was still

foWtt'WIIil W'h

too far away for me to be absolutely sure of
what all his motions meant.

At first he took soft clay in his bill from the ~S? Woodcock

J , • Ir'^Jl

edge of the water and seemed to be smear-
ing it on one leg near the knee. Then he
fluttered away on one foot for a short dis-
tance and seemed to be pulling tiny roots
and fibers of grass, which he worked into
the clay that he had already smeared on his
leg. Again he took more clay and plas-
tered it over the fibers, putting on more and
more till I could plainly see the enlargement,
working away with strange, silent intentness
for fully fifteen minutes, while I watched and
wondered, scarce believing my eyes. Then
he stood perfectly still for a full hour under
an overhanging sod, where the eye could
with difficulty find him, his only motion
meanwhile being an occasional rubbing and
smoothing of the clay bandage with his bill,
until it hardened enough to suit him, where-
upon he fluttered away from the brook and
disappeared in the thick woods.

I had my own explanation of the incred-
ible action, namely, that the woodcock had a

broken leg, and had deliberately put it into
a clay cast to hold the broken bones in place
^4 Woodcock. untii they should knit together again; but
naturally I kept my own counsel, knowing
that no one would believe in the theory.
For years I questioned gunners closely, and
found two who said that they had killed
woodcock whose legs had at one time been
broken and had healed again. As far as
they could remember, the leg had in each
case healed perfectly straight instead of twist-
ing out to one side, as a chicken's leg does
when broken and allowed to knit of itself.
I examined hundreds of woodcock in the
markets in different localities, and found one
whose leg had at one time been broken by a
shot and then had healed perfectly. There
were plain signs of dried mud at the break;
but that was also true of the other leg near
the foot, which only indicated that the bird
had been feeding in soft places. All this
proved nothing to an outsider, and I kept
silence as to what I had seen until last win-
ter, twenty years afterwards, when the con-
firmation came unexpectedly. I had been

speaking of animals before the Contemporary
Club of Bridgeport when a gentleman, a law-
yer well known all over the state, came to
me and told me eagerly of a curious find he
had made the previous autumn. He was
gunning one day with a friend, when they
shot a woodcock, which on being brought in
by the dog was found to have a lump of hard
clay on one of its legs. Curious to know
what it meant he chipped the clay off with
his penknife and found a broken bone, which
was then almost healed and as straight as
ever. A few weeks later the bird, had he
lived, would undoubtedly have taken off the
cast himself and there would have been noth-
ing to indicate anything unusual about him.
So I give the observation now, at last,
since proof is at hand, not to indicate a
new or old habit of Whitooweek,
— for how far the strange knowl-
edge is spread among the wood-
cock and the wading birds no
man can say, — but
simply to indicate
how little we know of

io6

the inner life of the hermit, and indeed of all
wild birds, and how much there is yet to be
^~^ *sa± OC discovered when we shall lay aside the gun
for the field-glass and learn to interpret the
wonderful life which goes on unseen all
about us.

VWWlL
^

ATE one

when the
the pines

winter afternoon,
was gilding
the western

sun

on

mountains and the shadows stretched long
and chill through the snow-laden woods, a
huge bull moose broke out of the gloom of
the spruces and went swinging up the long,
sunlit barren at a stride whose length and
power would have discouraged even a wolf
from following. Five minutes later I came
out of the same tunnel under the spruces
just as the fringe of green across the barren
swished back to cover the flanks of the plun-
ging bull, and then nodded and nodded in

twenty directions — This

that way !

here! yonder! — to mislead any that might
follow on his track. For at times even the
hemlocks and the alders and the waters and
the leaves and the creaking boughs and the
dancing shadows all seem to conspire to
shield the innocent Wood Folk from the
hostile eyes and hands of those that pur-
sue them. And that is one reason why it
is so hard to see game in the woods.

The big moose had fooled me that time.
When he knew that I was following him he
ran far ahead, and then circled swiftly back
to stand motionless in a hillside thicket
within twenty yards of the trail that he had
made scarcely an hour agone. There he
could see perfectly, without being seen, what
it was that was following him. When I
came by, following swiftly and silently the
deep tracks in the snow, he let me pass
below him while he took a good look and
a sniff at me; then he glided away like a
shadow in the opposite direction.

V~"'

V,

Unfortunately a dead branch under the snow

broke with a dull snap beneath his cautious

hoof, and I turned aside to see — and so df^en VpfdeeA/3

saved myself the long tramp up and down

the cunning trails. When he saw that his

trick was discovered he broke away for the

open barren, with all his wonderful powers

of eye and ear and tireless legs alert to save

himself from the man whom he mistook for

his deadly enemy.

It was of small use to follow him further,
so I sat down on a prostrate yellow birch to
rest and listen awhile in the vast silence,
and to watch anything that might be passing
through the cold white woods.

Under the fringe of evergreen the soft
purple shadows jumped suddenly, and a hare
as white as the snow bounded out. In long
nervous jumps, like a bundle of wire springs,
he went leaping before my face across a nar-
row arm of the barren to the shelter of a
point below. The soft arms of the ground
spruces and the softer shadows beneath them
seemed to open of their own accord to let him
in. All nodding of branches and dropping

of snow pads and jumping of shadows ceased
instantly, and all along the fringe of ever-
GJnen UpateekiS green Snent voices were saying, There is
nothing here; we have not seen him; there
is nothing here.

Now why did he run that way, I thought;
for Moktaques is a crazy, erratic fellow, and
never does things in a businesslike way
unless he has to. As I wondered, there was
a gleam of yellow fire under the purple
shadows whence Moktaques had come, and
the fierce round head of a Canada lynx
was thrust out of the tunnel that the hare
had made only a moment before. His big
gray body had scarcely pushed itself into
sight when the shadows stirred farther down
the fringe of evergreen ; another and another
lynx glided out; and I caught my breath as
five of the savage creatures swept across the
narrow arm of the barren, each with his head
thrust out, his fierce eyes piercing the gloom
ahead like golden lances, and holding his
place in the stately, appalling line of fierce-
ness and power as silent as the shadow of
death. My nerves tingled at the thought of

what would happen to Moktaques when one
of the line should discover and jump him.
Indeed, having no rifle, I was glad enough when (Jptdeekis

myself to sit very still and let the savage
creatures go by without finding me.

The middle lynx, a fierce old female, was
following the hare's trail; and in a moment
it flashed across me \vho she was and what
they were all doing. Here, at last, was the
secret of the lynx bands that one sometimes
finds in the winter woods, and that occasion-
ally threaten or appall one with a ferocity
that the individual animals never manifest.
For Upweekis, though big and fierce, is at
heart a slinking, cowardly, treacherous crea-
ture — like all cats — and so loves best to be
alone. Knowing that the rest of his tribe
are like himself, he suspects them all and is
fearful that in any division of common spoils
somebody else would get the lion's share. And
so I have never found among the cats any
trace of the well-defined regulations that seem
to prevail among nearly all other animals.

In winter, however, it is different. Then
necessity compels Upweekis to lay aside

some of his feline selfishness and hunt in
savage bands. Every seven years, especially,
Often Uptuee/US wjien rabbits are scarce in the woods because
of the sickness that kills them off periodically,
you may stumble upon one of these pirate
crews haunting the deer yards or following
after the caribou herds ; but until the ferocious
line swept out of the purple shadows under
my very eyes I had no idea that these bands
are — almost invariably, as I have since learned
— family parties that hold together through
the winter, just as fawns follow the old doe
until the spring comes, in order that her wis-
dom may find them food, and her superior
strength break a way for them when snows
are deep and enemies are hard at heel.

The big lynx in the middle was the
mother; the four other lynxes were her
cubs; and they held together now, partly
that their imperfect education might be fin-
ished under her own eyes, but chiefly that
in the hungry winter days they might com-
bine their powers and hunt more systemat-
ically, and pull down, if need be, the larger
animals that might defy them individually.

As she crossed the fresh trail of the bull
moose the old mother lynx thrust her big
head into it for a long sniff. The line closed *&***
up instantly and each lynx stood like a statue,
his blunt nose down into a reeking hoof mark,
studying through dull senses what it was
that had just passed. The old lynx swung
her head up and down the line of her mo-
tionless cubs; then with a ferocious snarl
curling under her \vhiskers she pushed for-
ward again. A score of starving lynxes all
together would scarcely follow a bull of that
stride and power. Only the smell of blood
would drag them unwillingly along such a
trail ; and even then, if they overtook the
author of it, they would only squat around
him in a fierce solemn circle, yawning hun-
grily and hoping he would die. Now, some-
where just ahead, easier game was hiding.
An unvoiced command seemed to run up
and down the line of waiting cubs. Each
thrust his head out at the same instant and
the silent march went on.

When the last of the line had glided out
of sight among the bushes of the point below,

n6

I ran swiftly through the woods, making no

noise in the soft snow, and crouched motion-
GJfien Vpweekis less under the spruces on the lower side of

tjie ^Q-m^ hoping to see the cunning hunters
again. There was but a moment to wait.
From under a bending evergreen tip Mokta-
ques leaped out and went flying across the
open for the next wooded point. Close be-
hind him sounded a snarl, and with a terrific
rush as she sighted the game the old lynx
burst out, calling savagely to her line of hunt-
ers to close in. Like the blast of a squall
they came, stretching out in enormous bounds
and closing in from either end so as to cut
off the circling run of the flying game. In
a flash the two ends of the line had met and
whirled in sharply; in another flash Mokta-
ques was crouching close in the snow in the
center of a fierce circle that rolled in upon
him like a whirlwind. As the smallest lynx
leaped for his ga'me an electric shock seemed
to touch the motionless hare. He shot for-
ward as if galvanized, leaping high over the
crouching terror before him, striving to break
out of the terrible circle. Then the lynx

over whose head he passed leaped straight
up, caught the flying creature fairly in his
great paws, fell over backwards, and was
covered in an instant by the other lynxes
that hurled themselves upon him like furies,
snapping and clawing ferociously at the
mouthful which he had pulled down at the
very moment of its escape.

There was an appalling scrimmage for
a moment; then, before I could fairly rub
my eyes, the hare had vanished utterly, and
a savage ring of lynxes were licking their
chops hungrily, glaring and growling at each
other to see which it was that had gotten
the biggest mouthful.

When they disappeared at last, slinking
away in a long line under the edge of the
barren, I took up the back track to see how
they had been hunting. For a full mile,
straight back toward my camp, I followed
the tracks and read the record of as keen
a bit of bush beating as was ever seen in
the woods. They had swept along all that
distance in an almost perfect line, starting
every living thing that lay athwart their

n8

Goes

path. Here it was a ruffed grouse that one
had jumped for and missed, as the startled
fatten Vpweek/s bird whirred away into the gioom. There

one had climbed a tree and shaken some-
thing off into the snow, where the others
licked up every morsel so clean that I could
not tell what the unfortunate creature was;
but a curious bit of savage daring was mani-
fest, for the lynx that had gone up the tree
after the game had hurled himself down like
a catapult, leaving a huge hole in the snow,
so as to be in at the death before his savage
fellows, which had come flying in with
great bounds, should have eaten every-
thing and left not even a smell for his
own share. And there, at last, at the
very end of the line, another hare had
been started and, running in a short
circle, as hares often do, had been
met and seized by the fourth lynx
as the long line swung in swiftly to
head him off.

Years later, and miles away on the Re-
nous barrens, I saw another and more won-
' ,: derful bit of the same keen hunting. From

a ridge above a small barren I saw a herd
of caribou acting strangely and went down
to investigate. As I reached the fringe of
thick bushes that lined the open I saw the
caribou cluster excitedly about the base of
a big rock across the barren, not more than
two hundred yards away. Something was
there, evidently, which excited their curi-
osity,— and caribou are the most inquisitive
creatures, at times, in all the woods, — but
I had to study the rock sharply through my
field-glasses before I made out the round
fierce head of a big lynx pressed flat against
the gray stone. One side of the rock was
almost perpendicular, rising sheer some fif-
teen or twenty feet above the plain; the
other side slanted off less abruptly toward
the woods ; and the big lynx, which had
probably scrambled up from the woods to spy
on the caribou, was now hanging half over
the edge of rock, swaying his savage head
from side to side and stretching one wide
paw after another at the animals beneath.

The caribou were getting more excited
and curious every moment. Caribou are like

I2O

turkeys ; when they see some new thing they
must die or find out about it. Now they were
when (Jpltteek/s spreading and closing their ranks, wavering
back and forti1) stretching ears and noses
at the queer thing on the rock, but drawing
nearer and nearer with every change.

Suddenly the lynx jumped, not at the
caribou, for they were still too far away,
but high in the air with paws outspread.
He came down in a flurry of snow, whirled
round and round as if bewitched, then van-
ished silently in two great jumps into the
shelter of the nearest evergreens.

The caribou broke wildly at the strange
sight, but turned after a startled bound or
two to see what it was that had frightened
them. There was nothing in sight, and like
a flock of foolish sheep they came timidly
back, nosing the snow and stretching their
ears at the rock again; for
there at the top was the
big lynx, swinging his
round head from side to

^'- -^^ side as before,

^— • and reaching

121

his paws alternately at the herd, as if to show
them how broad and fine they were.

Slowly the little herd neared the rock and tihen
the lynx drew back, as if to lure them on.
They were full of burning curiosity, but they
had seen one spring, at least, and measured
its power, and so kept at a respectful dis-
tance. Then one young caribou left the
others and went nosing along the edge of
the woods to find the trail of the queer thing,
or get to leeward of the rock, and so find
out by smell — which is the only sure sense
that a caribou possesses — what it was all
about. A wind seemed to stir a dried tuft
of grass on the summit of the great rock.
I put my glasses upon it instantly, then
caught my breath in suppressed excitement
as I made out the tufted ears of two or
three other lynxes crouching flat on their
high tower, out of sight of the foolish herd,
but watching every movement with fierce,
yellow7, unblinking eyes.

The young caribou found the trail, put
his nose down into it, then started cau-
tiously back toward the rock to nose the

other hole in the snow and be sure that it

smelled just like the first one. Up on the
tiften Upweekis rock the big lynx drew f urther back . the

^erd Pressed close, raising their heads high
to see what he was doing; and the young
caribou stole up and put his nose down into
the trail again. Then three living catapults
shot over the high rim of the rock and
fell upon him. Like a flash the big lynx
was on his feet, drawing himself up to his
full height and hurling a savage screech of
exultation after the flying herd. Then he,
too, shot over the rock, fell fair on the neck
of the struggling young caribou, and bore
him down into the snow.

Upweekis is a stupid fellow. He will
poke his big head into a wire noose as fool-
ishly as any rabbit, and then he will fight
savagely with the pole at the other end of
the noose until he chokes himself. But no
one could follow that wonderful trail in the
snow, or sit with tingling nerves under the
spruces watching that wild bit of fox-play,
without a growing respect for the shadowy

"Then he, too, shot over
the rock"

125

creature of the big round tracks that wan-
der, wander everywhere through the winter
woods, and without wondering intensely in w/i€n VpiaeeiflS

what kind of savage school Mother Upweekis
trains her little ones.

K'DUNK THE FAT ONE

''DUNK THE FAT ONE, as Simmo
calls him, came out of his winter den
the morning after the Reverend James
had stirred the sod of his first flower
bed. It was early April, and the first
smell of spring \vas in the air — that subtle
call of Mother Earth to her drowsy children
to awake and come out and do things. The
Reverend James felt the call in his nose and,
remembering his boyhood, as we all do at the
smell of spring, resolved to go fishing after
he had finished his morning paper. His wife
felt it, went to the door, took a long breath
and cried, " Is n't this just glorious ! " Then
129

she grabbed a trowel — for when a man must
off to the brook for his first trout a woman,
by the same inner compulsion, must dig in
an<^ started for the flower bed.

moment later her excited call came floating
in through the open window.

" Ja-a-a-a-mes ? James!" — the first call
with a long up slide, the second more per-
emptory— "what in the world did you plant
in this flower bed ? "

" Why," said the Reverend James, peer-
ing quizzically over the rim of his spectacles
at the open window, "why, I thought I
planted portulaca seed."

" Then come out here and see what 's
come up," ordered his wife; and the sur-
prised old gentleman came hurriedly to the
door to blink in astonishment at three fat
toads that were also blinking in the warm
sunshine, and a huge mud-turtle that wras
sprawling and hissing indignantly in a great
hole in the middle of his flower bed.

A sly, whimsical twinkle was under the
old minister's spectacles as he regarded the
queer crop that had come up overnight.

" Whatsoever a man soweth, whatsoever a
man soweth," he quoted softly to himself,

eying the three toads askance, and poking

the big turtle inquisitively, but snapping his ^^

hand back at sight and sound of the hooked

beak and the fierce hissing. Then, because

his library contained no book of exegesis

equal to the occasion, he caught a small boy

who was passing on his way to school and

sent him off post-haste to my rooms to find

out what it was all about.

Now the three fat toads had also smelled
the spring down in a soft spot under the
lawn, whither, in the previous autumn, they
had burrowed for their winter sleep. When
the Reverend James stirred the sod, the
warm sun thawed them out and brought
them the spring's message, and they scram-
bled up to the surface promptly, as full of
new life as if they had not been frozen into
insensible clods for the past six months. As
for the big turtle, the smell of the fresh earth
had probably brought her up from the neigh-
boring pond to search out a nest for herself
where she might lay her eggs. Finding the

One

soft warm earth of the portulaca bed, she
had squirmed and twisted her way down
into it, the loose earth tumbling in on her
and hiding her as she went down.

When the sharp feminine eyes swept over
the flower bed they detected at once the
hollow in the middle, showing careless work-
manship on the part of somebody. " That
hole must be filled up," promptly declared
Mrs. James; but first, woman-like, she thrust
her trowel deep into it. "Aha! a rock —
careless man," she gave judgment, and took
another jab and a two-handed
heave at the hard
object. Whereupon
out came the big mud-turtle, scrambling,
hissing, protesting with beak and claw
against being driven out of the best nest
she had ever found so early in the season.
That night there were curious sounds
in the grass and dead leaves —
rustlings and croakings and low
husky trills, as the toads came
hopping briskly by
twos and threes

down to the pond. From every direction,
from garden and lawn and wood and old
stone wall, they came croaking and trilling
through the quiet twilight, and hopping high
with delight at the first smell of water.
Down the banks they came, sliding, rolling,
tumbling end over end, — any way to get
down quickly, — landing at last with glad
splashings and croakings in the warm shal-
lows, where they promptly took to biting
and clawing and absurd little wrestling
bouts; which is the toad's way of settling
his disputes and taking his own mate away
from the other fellows.

Two or three days they stayed in the pond,
filling the air with gurgling croaks and filling
the water with endless strings of gelatine-
coated eggs — enough to fill the whole pond
banks-full cf pollywogs, did not Mother Na-
ture step in and mercifully dispose of ninety-
nine per cent of them within a few days of
hatching, and set the rest of them to eating
each other industriously as they grew, till
every pollywog that was left might truthfully
sing with the cannibalistic mariner:

Oh, I am the cook and the captain bold
And the mate of the Nancy brig,

The bo'sn tight and the midshipmite
And the crew of the captain's gig.

For every pollywog represented in his proper
person some hundred or more of his fellow-
pollywogs that he had eaten in the course of
his development. But long before that time
the toads had left the pond, scattering to the
four winds whence they had come, caring not
now what became of their offspring. It was
then that K'dunk the Fat One came back to
the portulaca bed.

Mrs. James found him there the next
morning — a big, warty gray toad with a
broad grin and a fat belly and an eye like
a jewel — blinking sleepily after his night's
hunting. " Mercy ! there 's that awful toad
again. I hope " — with a cautious glance
all round — "I hope he hasn't brought the
turtle with him." She gave him a prod and
a flip with the trowel to get him out of the
flower bed, whereupon K'dunk scrambled
into his hole under an overhanging sod and
refused to come out, spite of tentative pokes

of the trowel in a hand that was altogether
too tender to hurt him. And there he

stayed, waging his silent warfare against the
trowel, until I chanced along and persuaded
the good lady that she was trying to drive One
away the very best friend that her flowers
could possibly have. Then K'dunk settled
down in peace, and we all took to watch-
ing him.

His first care was to make a few hiding
holes here and there in the garden. Most
of these were mere hollows in the soft
earth, where K'dunk would crouch with eyes
shut tight whenever his enemies were near.
His color changed rapidly till it was the
same general hue as his surroundings, so
that, when he lay quiet and shut his bright
eyes in one of his numerous hollows, it was
almost impossible to find him. But after he
had been worried two or three times by the
house-dog — a fat, wheezy little pug that
always grew excited when K'dunk began to
hop about in the twilight but that could
never bark himself up to the point of touch-
ing the clammy thing with his nose — he

dug other holes, under the sod banks, or
beside a rock, where Grunt, the pug, could
not bother him without getting too much
out of breath.

x*» We made friends with him at first by

^ scratching his back with a stick, at which
pleasant operation he would swell and grunt
with satisfaction. But you could never tell
when he would get enough, or at what mo-
ment he would feel his dignity touched in a
tender spot and go hopping off to the garden
in high dudgeon. Then we fed him flies
and bits of tender meat, which we would
wiggle with a bit of grass to make them
seem alive. At the same time we whistled
a certain call to teach him when his supper ,
was ready. Then, finally, by gentle han-
dlings and pettings he grew quite tame, and
at the sound of the whistle would scramble
out from under the door-step, where he lived
by day, and hop briskly in our- direction to
be fed and played with.

Though K'dunk had many interesting
traits, which we discovered with amazement
as the summer progressed and we grew better

acquainted, I think that his feeding ways
and tricks were the source of our most con-
stant delight and wonder. Just to see him
stalk a fly filled one with something of the
tense excitement of a deer hunt. As he sat
by a stump or clod in the fading light, some
belated fly or early night-bug would light on
the ground in front of him. Instantly the
jewel eye in K'dunk's head would begin to
flash and sparkle. He would crouch down
and creep nearer, toeing in like a duck,
slower and slower, one funny little paw
brushing cautiously by the other, with all
the stealth and caution of a cat stalking a
chipmunk on the wall. Then, as he neared
his game, there would be a bright flash of
the jewel; a red streak shot through the
air, so quick that your eye could not follow
it, and the fly would disappear. Whereupon
K'dunk would gulp something down,
closing his eyes solemnly as he did
so, as if he were saying grace, or as if,
somehow, closing his eyes to all out-
ward things made the morsel taste
better.

The red streak, of course, was K'dunk's
tongue, wherein lies the secret of his hunting.
It is attached at the outer rim of his mouth,
anc^ folds back in his throat. The inner
<^, q^fQ end ^ broad and soft and sticky, and he
snaps it out and back quick as a wink or a
lizard. Whatever luckless insect the tongue
touches is done with all bothering of our
humanity. The sticky tongue snaps him up
and back into K'dunk's wide mouth before
he has time to spread a wing or even to think
what is the matter with him.

Once I saw him stalk a grasshopper, a big
lively green fellow that, in a particularly long
jump, had come out of the protecting grass
and landed on the brown earth directly in
front of where K'dunk was catching the flies
that were coming in a steady stream to a
bait that I had put out for them. Instantly
K'dunk turned his attention from the flies
to the larger game. Just as his tongue shot
out the grasshopper, growing suspicious,
jumped for cover. The soft tongue missed
him by a hair, but struck one of his trailing
legs and knocked him aside. In an instant

CHARLES COPElAn/D.

' The soft tongue struck one of his
trailing legs"

K'dunk was after him again, his legs scram-
bling desperately, his eyes blazing, and his
tongue shooting in and out like a streak of
flame. Just as the grasshopper rose in a
hard jump the tongue hit him, and I saw no
more. But K'dunk's gulp was bigger and
his eyes were closed for a longer period than
usual, and there was a loud protesting rustle
in his throat as the grasshopper's long legs
went kicking down the road that has no
turning.

A big caterpillar that I found and brought
to K'dunk one day afforded us all another
field for rare observation. The caterpillar
was a hairy fellow, bristling with stiff spines,
and I doubted that the tongue had enough
mucilage on it to stick to him. But K'dunk
had no such doubts. His tongue flew out
and his eyes closed solemnly. At the same
time I saw the caterpillar shrink himself to-
gether and stick his spines out stiffer than
ever. Then a curious thing came out, namely,
that K'dunk's mouth is so big and his game
is usually so small that he cannot taste his
morsel ; he just swallows mechanically, as if

142

One

he were so used to catching his game that
it never occurred to him that he could miss.
When he opened his eyes and saw the cater-
pillar in the same place, he thought, evidently,
that it was another one which had come in
mysteriously on wings, as the flies were com-
ing to my bait. Again his tongue shot out,
and his eyes closed in a swallow of delight.
But there in front of him, as his eyes opened,
was another caterpillar. Such perfect har-
mony of supply and demand was never known
to a toad before.

Again and again his tongue shot out, and
each shot was followed by a blink and a gulp.
All the while that he kept up this rapid
shooting he thought he was getting fresh
caterpillars; and all the while the hairy fel-
low was shrinking closer and closer together
and sticking his spines out like a porcupine.
But he was getting more mucilage on him
at every shot. " That caterpillar is getting
too stuck-up to live," presently said little
Johnnie, who was watch-
ing the game with me;
and at the word a hairy

ball shot into the wide mouth that was yawn-
ing for him, and K'dunk went back to his
fly-catching. ^^UnJ^ ***?

It is probably this lack of taste on K'dunk's
part that accounts for the astonishing variety
in his food. Nothing in the shape of an insect
seemed to come amiss to him. Flies, wasps,
crickets, caterpillars, doodle-bugs, and beetles
of every description were all treated alike
to the same red flash of his tongue and the
blinking gulp. A half-dozen boys and girls,
who were watching the queer pet with me,
were put to their wits' end to find some-
thing that he would not eat. One boy, who
picked huckleberries, brought in three or
four of the disagreeable little bugs, known
without a name by every country boy, that
have the skunk habit of emitting overpower-
ing odors when disturbed, thinking that he
had found, a poser for our pet; but K'dunk
gobbled them up as if they had been set
before him as a relish to tickle his appetite.
Another brought potato bugs ; but these too
were fish for K'dunk's net. Then a third
boy, who had charge of a kitchen garden,

went away wagging his head and saying
that he had just picked something that no
living thing would eat. When he came back
he had a horse-radish bottle that swarmed
<^. gr'* n w^h squash-bugs, twenty or thirty of the vile-
smelling things, which he dumped out on
the ground and stirred up with a stick.

Somebody ran and brought K'dunk from
one of his hiding-places and set him down
on the ground in front of the squirming
mess. For a moment he seemed to be
eying his proposition with astonishment.
Then he crouched down and the swift red
tongue-play began. In four minutes, by my
watch, every squash-bug that stirred had dis-
appeared, and K'dunk finished the others as
fast as we could wiggle them with a straw
to make them seem alive.

We gave up trying to beat him on variety
after that, and settled down to the apparently
simple task of trying to find out how many
insects he could eat before calling halt. But
even here K'dunk was too much for us ; we
never, singly or all together, reached the
limit of his appetite. Once we fed him

ninety rose-bugs without stopping. Another
afternoon, when three boys appeared at the
same hour, we put our catch together, a
varied assortment of flies, bugs, and creeping
things, a hundred and sixty-four head all
told. Before dark K'dunk had eaten them
all, and went hopping off to the garden on
his night's hunting — as if he had net already
done enough to prove himself our friend for
the entire summer.

Later we adopted a different plan and ^
made the game come to K'dunk on its own
wings, instead of running all over creation
ourselves to catch it for him. Near the
barn was a neglected drain where the flies v
were numerous enough to warn us to look ^ Jj
after our sanitation more zealously. Here I
built a little cage of wire netting, in which I
placed a dead rat and some scraps from the ^\^>
table. When the midday sun found them
and made them odorous, big flies began to
pour in, with the loud buzzing which seems
to be a signal to their fellows; for in ordi-
nary flight the same flies
are almost noiseless. Once,

however, they find a bit of carrion fit for their
eggs, they buzz about loudly every few min-
utes, and other flies hear them ; whereupon
their quiet flight changes to a loud buzzing.
So the news spreads — at least this seems
y? to help the matter — and flies pour in from
every direction.

At three o'clock I brought K'dunk from
his meditations under the door-step and set
him down in the cage, screening him with a
big rhubarb leaf so that the sun would not
dazzle his eyes too much. Then I took out
my watch and sat down on a rock to count.

In the first ten minutes K'dunk got barely
a dozen flies. They were wary of him in the
bright light, and he was not yet waked up to
the occasion. Then he crouched down be-
tween the rat and the scraps, worked a hol-
low for himself where he could turn without
being noticed, and the red tongue-play began
in earnest. In the next half hour he got
sixty-six flies, an average of over two a min-
ute. In an hour his record was a hundred
and ten ; and before I left him he had added
two dozen more to the score of our enemies.

Then the flies ceased coming, as the air
grew cool, and I carried him back to the
door-step. But that night, later than usual,
he was off to the garden again to keep up
his splendid work.

When the summer glow-worms came
(lightning-bugs the boys called them) we saw
another curious and pretty bit of hunting.
One night, as we sat on the porch in the
soft twilight, I saw the first lightning-bug
glowing in the grass, and went to catch it
as a jewel for a lady's hair. As I reached
down my hand under a bush, the glow sud-
denly disappeared, and I put my fingers on
K'dunk instead. He, too, had seen the glow
and had instantly adopted jacking as his
mode of hunting.

Later I caught a lightning-bug and put it
in a tiny bottle, and dropped it in front of
K'dunk as he started across the lawn in the
late twilight. He saw the glow through
glass and took a shot at it promptly.
As with the hairy caterpillar, he shut
his eyes as he gulped down the imagi-
native morsel, and when he „

147

opened them again there was another light-
ning-bug glowing in the grass just where the
first had been. So he kept the tiny bot-
tle jumping about the lawn at the repeated
laps of his tongue, blinking and swallowing
betweenwhiles until the glow-worm, made
dizzy perhaps by the topsy-turvy play of his
strange cage, folded his wings and hid his
little light. Whereupon K'dunk hopped
away, thinking, no doubt, in his own way,
that while lightning-bugs were unusually
thick that night and furnished the prettiest
kind of hunting, they were very poor satis-
faction to a hungry stomach, — not to be
compared with what he could get by
~\ jumping up at the insects that hid on
i>^> \ the under side of the leaves on every
plant in the garden.

It needed no words of mine by this
time to convince the good Mrs. James
that K'dunk was her friend. Indeed
she paid a small boy ten cents apiece
'/^/~h for a half dozen toads to turn
>/ c loose about the premises to help
fj c*-, K'dunk in his excellent work.

And the garden flourished as never before,
thanks to the humble little helpers. But

K'dunk's virtues were more than utilitarian ;
he was full of unexpected things that kept us
all constantly watching with delight to see One
what would happen next. As I said, he soon
learned to come to the call; but more than
that, he was fond of music. If you whistled
a little tune softly, he would stay perfectly
still until you finished before going off on
his night's hunting. Then, if you changed
the tune, or whistled discordantly, he would
hop away as if he had no further use for
you.

Sometimes, at night, a few young people
would gather on the porch and sing together,
— a proceeding which often tolled K'dunk
out from under the door-step, and which, on
one occasion, brought him hopping hurriedly
back from the garden, whither he had gone
an hour before to hunt his supper. Quiet
hymns he seemed to like, for he always kept
still as a worshiper, — which pleased the Rev-
erend James immensely, — but " rag-time "
music he detested, if one could judge by his

actions and by the unmistakable way he had
of turning his back upon what did not appeal
to him or touch his queer fancy.

^ne evening a young girl with a very
sweet natural voice was singing by an open
window on the porch. She was singing for
the old folks' pleasure, that night, some old
simple melodies that they liked best. Just
within the window the piano was playing a
soft accompaniment. A stir in the grass at-
tracted my attention, and there was K'dunk
trying in vain to climb up the step. I called
Mrs. James' attention quietly to the queer
guest, and then lifted K'dunk gently to the
piazza. There he followed along the rail until
he was close beside the singer, where he sat
perfectly still, listening intently as long as she
sang. Nor was she conscious that night of
this least one among her hearers.

Two or three times this happened in the
course of the summer. The girl's voice
seemed to have a fascination for our homely
little pet, for at the first sweet notes he
would scramble out from his hiding and
try to climb the steps. When I lifted him

to the porch he would hop along till close
beside the singer, where he would sit, all
quietness and appreciation, as long as she
sang. Then, one night when he had sat
humble and attentive at her feet through
two songs, a tenor who studied in New
York, and who sometimes gave concerts, was
invited to sing. He responded promptly
and atrociously with "O Hully Gee," —
which was not the name of the thing, but
only the academy boys' version of a once
popular love-song. Had K'dunk been a
German choir-leader he could not have so
promptly and perfectly expressed his opin-
ion of the wretched twaddle. It was not
the fool words, which he could not fortu-
nately understand, nor yet the wretched
tingle-tangle music, wrhich was past pray-
ing for, but rather the voice itself with its
forced unnatural quality so often affected by
tenors. At the first strident notes K'dunk
grew uneasy. .Then he scrambled to the
edge of the porch and fell. off headlong in
his haste to get down and away from the
soul-disturbing performance.

The sudden flight almost caused a panic
and an awful breach of hospitality among
the few who were quietly watching things,
cover an irrepressible chuckle I slipped
^ away after K'dunk, who scrambled clear to the
pie-plant patch before he stopped hopping.
As I went I heard the gentle Mrs. James,
soul of goodness and hospitality, coughing
violently into her handkerchief, as if a rude
draught had struck her sensitive throat; but
it sounded to me more like a squirrel that
I once heard snickering inside of a hollow
pumpkin. However, the tenor sang on, and
all was well. K'dunk meanwhile was engaged
in the better task of ridding the garden of
noxious bugs, sitting up at times, in a funny
way he had, and scratching the place where
his ear should be.

It wras soon after this, when we all loved
K'dunk better than ever, that the most as-
tonishing bit of his queer life came to the
surface. Unlike the higher orders of ani-
mals, K'dunk receives no training whatever
from his elders. The lower orders live so
simple a life that instinct is enough for

them; and so Nature, who can be provi-
dent at times, as well as wasteful, omits the
superfluous bother of teaching them. But
many things he did before our eyes for
which instinct could never account, and
many difficulties arose for which innate
knowledge was not sufficient; and then we
saw his poor dull wits at work against the
unexpected problems of the universe.

As the summer grew hotter and hotter
K'dunk left the door-step and made for him-
self a better den. All toads do this in the
scorching days — hollow out a retreat under
a sod or root or rotten stump, and drowse
there in its cool damp shade while the sun
blisters overhead. Just in front of the door-
step some broad flagstones extended across
the lawn to the sidewalk. The frosts of
many winters had forced them apart, some
more and some less, and a ribbon of green
grass now showed between many pairs of
the stones. Where the ribbon was widest
K'dunk found out, in some way, that the
thin sod covered a hollow underneath, and
he worked at this until the sod gave way

and he tumbled into a roomy cavern under
one of the flagstones. Here it was always
cool, and he abandoned the d«oor-step forth-
™^. -. with, sleeping through the drowsy August

<% ft* i* days in the better place that his wits had
*~//}G jrQi i . T

f* discovered.

Now K'dunk, with good hunting in the
garden and with much artificial feeding at
our hands, grew fatter and fatter. At times
when he came hopping home in the morn-
ing, swelled out enormously with the un-
counted insects that he had eaten, he found
the space between the flagstones uncomfort-
ably narrow. Other toads have the same
difficulty and, to avoid it, simply scratch
the entrance to their dens a little wider;
but dig and push as he would, K'dunk
could not budge the flagstones.

He scratched a longer entrance after his
first hard squeezing, but that did no good;
the doorway was still uncomfortably narrow,
and he often reminded me, going into his
house, of a very fat and pompous man try-
ing to squeeze through a turnstile, tugging
and pushing and tumbling through with a

grunt at last, and turning to eye the inven-
tion indignantly. To get out of his den
was easy, for during the long day he had
digested his dinner and was thin again ; but
how to get in comfortably in the morning
with a full stomach, — that was the question.

One morning I saw him come out of the
garden, and I knew instantly that he had
more trouble ahead. He had found some
rich nests of bugs that night and had eaten
enormously; his "fair round body" dragged
along the grass as he crawled rather than
hopped to his doorway, and his one desire
seemed to be to tumble into his den drow-
sily and go to sleep. But alas ! he could not
get in. He had reached the limit at last.

First he put his head and shoulders
through, and by pulling at the under side
of the flagstones tried to hitch and coax
his way in. All in vain ! His fat body
caught between the obstinate flags and only
wedged tighter and tighter. The bulging
part without was so much bigger than the
part within that he must have given it
up^at a glance, could he only have seen

(TafOne

himself. But he worked away with wonderful
patience till he knew it was of no use, when
he pushed himself out again and sat look-
ing into his inhospitable doorway, blinking
an<^ tousled and all covered with dust and
grass roots. As he sat he kept scratching
the place where his ear should be, as if he
were thinking.

In a moment or two, as if he had solved
the problem, he turned around and hitched
his hind legs into the hole. He was going
in backwards, but carefully, awkwardly, as
if he were not used to it. This, however,
was worse than the other, for his obstinate
belly only wedged the tighter and, with a
paw down on either side of him, every push
lifted him up instead of pulling him down.
He gave up quicker than before, because
his head was out now and he could see
better how he was progressing. At last he
lay down, as if he had solved the problem,
--f '- and tried to squirm through his long doorway

lengthwise. This was better. He
fe could get either his hind legs or

^s nead and shoulders through ;

but, like the buckets in the well, when one
end was down the other end was up, and still
his fat, obstinate body refused to go through
with the rest. Still he seemed to be making
progress, for every teeter of head and legs
worked his uncomfortable dinner into better
shape. At the end he wedged himself too
tight, and there was a harder scramble to get
out than there had been to get in. By a
desperate push and kick he freed himself
at last and sat, all tousled again, blinking
into his doorway, meditating.

Suddenly he turned and lowered his hind
legs into the hole. He was more careful
this time, afraid of being caught. When
he had dropped through as far as he could
go, he sat very still for some moments, sup
porting himself with a paw on either side.
His jaws opened slowly — and full of won-
der at a curious twitching motion he was
making, I crept near on hands and knees
and looked down into his wide-open mouth.
There was his dinner, all sorts of flies and
night-bugs, coming up little by little and
being held in his great mouth as in a basket,

/fie
TafOne

while his stomach worked below and sent up
supplies to relieve the pressure.

Slowly he slipped down as the stones
^ __ began to lose their hard grip. A squirm,
nr &•* a tvv'ist' a comfortable roll of his stomach, a
* sudden jounce — and the thing was done.

K'dunk wras resting with* a paw on either
flagstone, his body safe below and his mouth,
still wide open above, holding its precious
contents, like an old-fashioned valise that
had burst open. Then he swallowed his
disturbed dinner down again in big gulps,
and with a last scramble disappeared into
his cool den.

That night he did not come out, but the
second night he was busy in the garden as
usual. To our deep regret he deserted both
the door-step and the den with its narrow
opening under the flagstones. It may be
that in his own way he had pondered the
problem of what might have become of him
had the owl been after him when he came
home that morning; for \vhen I found him
again he was safe under the hollow roots
of an old apple-tree, where the entrance was

wide enough to tumble in quickly, however
much he had eaten. And there he stayed
by day as long as I kept tabs on him.

There was but one more interesting trait
that I discovered in the last days of the
summer, and that was his keenness in finding
the best hunting-grounds. Just behind his
den in the old apple-tree was a stone wall,
under which insects of all kinds were plenty.
K'dunk's den was on the east side, so that
the sun as it set threw the cool shade of the
wall over the place and brought our pet out
earlier than was his wont. In some way he
found out that the west side of the wall
caught and held the sun's last rays, and that
flies and all sorts of insects would light or .
crawl on the hot stones to get warm in the -;
late afternoon. He made a tunnel for him- P
self under the wall, just behind his den, and
would lie close beside a certain gray stone :v^'
on the west side, his gray color hiding him |j
perfectly, picking off the flies as :.•,•>•;.;;:'
they lit with the quickness and fa&S&i&S.
certainty of a lizard. When bugs
and insects crawled out of their

<ffS^

i6o

holes to sun themselves awhile on a warm
stone, K'dunk, whose eye ranged up and
down over his hunting-ground, would lie
until they settled comfortably, and would
<^r <^r*jf ft then creep cautiously within range and snap
them up with a flash of his tongue that the
eye could scarcely follow. In a dozen after-
noons, watching him there, I never saw him
miss a single shot, while the number of flies
and insects he destroyed must have reached
up into the hundreds.

In the same field four or five cows were
pastured, and on pleasant days they were
milked out of doors instead of being driven
into the barn. Now those who have watched
cows at milking time have probably noted
how the flies swarm on their legs, clustering
thickly above the hoofs, where the switch-
ing of a nervous tail cannot disturb them.
K'dunk had noted it too, and often during
the milking, when the cows were quiet, he
would approach a certain animal out of the
herd, creep up on one hoof after another
and snap off every fly wdthin reach. Then
he would jump for the highest ones, hitting

them almost invariably, and tumble off on

his back after a successful shot But in a

moment he had scrambled back on a hoof

again and was waiting for the next fly to ^t&

light within range. The most curious part

of it all was that he attached himself to one

cow, and would seek her out of the herd

wherever she was being milked. He never,

so far as I observed, went near any of the

others; and the cow after a time seemed to

recognize the' toad as a friend, and would

often stand still after being milked as long

as K'dunk remained perched on one of her

hoofs.

As the summer waned and green things
disappeared from the garden he deserted
that also, going wider and wider afield in
his night's hunting. He grew wilder, too,
as all things do in the autumn days, till at
last no whistle, however loud, would bring
him back. Whether the owl caught him,
or whether he still looks forward to the
long life that Nature gives to the toads, I
do not know; but under the edge of the
portulaca bed, as I write, is a suspicious

162

hollow that the frosts and snows have not
quite concealed. I shall watch that in the
spring with more than common interest to

know whether K'dunk the Fat One remem-
is old friends>

One

NE day, in a long tramp through
the heavy forest that borders
3 the Little Southwest River, I came

upon a dim old road that had been bushed
the previous winter and, having nothing
better to do, followed it to see whither it
would lead me. Other feet than mine had
recently gone on the same errand, for every
soft spot in the earth, every moldering log
and patch of swamp moss and muddy place
beside the brook, had deep footprints and
claw marks to tell me that Mooween the
bear had gone back and forth many times
165

,, over the same trail. Then I knew what I
loo

would find at the other end of it, and was not

at all surprised when it led me to the open
* yard of a big lumber camp beside the river.

There is always a fascination in such
places, where men have lived their simple
lives in the heart of the woods, shut out
from all the rest of the world during the
long winter; so I began to prowl quietly
about the shanties to see what I could find.
The door of the low stable swung invitingly
open, but it was a dark, musty, ill-smelling
place now, though cozy enough in winter,
and only the porcupines had invaded it.
I left it after a glance and came round to
the men's shanty.

The door of this was firmly locked ; but
a big hole had been torn in the roof by
bears, and I crawled in by that entrance.
Mooween had been here many times ahead
of me. Every corner of the big room, the
bunks and the cupboards and even the
stove, had been ransacked from one end to
the other; and the strong, doggy smell of a
bear was everywhere, showing how recently

' Mooween had teen here many times
ahead of me "

he had searched the place. Here in a cor-
ner a large tin box had been wrenched open,
and flour was scattered over the floor and
deacon-seat, as if a whirlwind had struck the
place. Mooween was playful evidently ; or
perhaps he was mad that the stuff for which
he had taken so much trouble was too dry
to eat. The white print of one paw was
drawn everywhere on the floor and walls.
This was the paw of a little bear, who had
undoubtedly come late, and had to be con-
tent with what the others had left.

All over the log floor some cask or vessel
had been rolled about before the flour was
spilled, and I knew instantly that I was on
the track of the first bear that entered, the
big fellow that had torn the hole in the roof
and had then nosed all over the camp with-
out disturbing anything until he found what
he wanted. As the thing was rolled about
under his paw the contents had been spilled
liberally, and Mooween had followed it about,
lapping up what he found on the floor and
leaving not a single drop to tell the story;
but from the flies that gathered in clusters

jj

^^

in every sunny spot I knew that the stuff
must have been sweet — molasses probably
— and that Mooween, after he had eaten it
all, had carried away the pail or jug to lick
it clean, as bears almost invariably do when
they sack a lumber camp.

Other bears had followed him into the
camp and found poor pickings. One had
thumped open a half barrel of pork and
sampled the salty contents, and then had
nosed a pile of old moccasins inquisitively.
A dozen axes and peaveys had been pulled
out of a barrel and thrown on the floor, to
see if perchance they had hidden anything
good to eat. Every pot and pan in the big
cupboard had been taken out and given a
lap or two to find out what they had cooked
last ; and one bear had stood up on his hind
legs and swept off the contents of a high
shelf with a sweep of his paw. Altogether
the camp had been sacked thoroughly, and
it was of little use for any other bear to
search the place. The camp seemed to be
waiting silently for the lumbermen to come
back in the fall and set things to rights.

I crawled back through the hole in the
roof and began to search the big yard
carefully. If Mooween had carried anything
outside, it would be found not far away;
and there is a keen interest, for me at least,
in finding anything that the Wood Folk have
touched or handled. The alder stick that
the beaver cut yesterday, or the little mud
pie that his paws have patted smooth; the
knot that the young coons have used as a
plaything in their den to beguile the hours
when their mother was away; the tree
against which two or three bears have
measured and scratched their height; the
log where the grouse drums; the discarded
horn of a moose; the track of an unknown
beast; the old den of a lucivee, — in all
these things, and a thousand more, there
is I know not what fascination that draws
me a mile out of my course just to stand
for a moment where wild little feet have
surely passed and to read the silent records
they have left behind them.

In front of the camp door was a huge pile
of chips where the lumbermen had chopped

their wood during the long winter. I walked
up on this, wondering at its huge size and
making a great clatter as the chips slipped
from under me. Suddenly there was a ter-
rifying rumble at my feet. A bear burst
out of the chip pile, as if he had been blown
up by an explosion, and plunged away head-
long into the silent woods.

This was startling enough on a quiet day.
I had been looking for something that Moo-
ween had left, not for Moo\veen himself. I
stood stock still where I was on the chip
pile, staring after the bear, wondering first
where he came from, and then wondering
what would have happened had he been
inside the shanty when I came in through
the roof. Then I came down and found the
queerest den that ever I have stumbled upon
in the woods.

On the north side of the mound a tunnel
a couple of feet long had been dug by the
bear, and the heart of the chip pile had been
thrown out to make a little cave, just big
enough for Mooween to lie down in. I poked
my head into it, and to my astonishment

found it to be a regular ice house, with
snow and ice packed in solidly among
the chips. I tried the pile in other places
and found the same conditions everywhere.
A foot or two beneath the surface the ice
remained as perfectly preserved as if it were
January instead of midsummer. Here were
shade and coolness such as no sun could
disturb, and in a moment it came to me how
the queer thing had come about.

All winter long the lumbermen had
chopped their fire-wood on the same spot,
using axes only, and making an enormous
amount of chips and rubbish. When heavy
snows fell, instead of clearing it away, they
simply cut more wood on top of it, tramp-
ing the snow beneath into a solid mass and
covering it over with fresh chips. So the pile
grew, — first a layer of chips, then a thick
blanket of snow, then more chips and snow
again, — growing bigger and bigger until in
April the lumbermen locked their shanty
and went out on the spring drive of logs.

When the spring sun melted the snow in
the woods the big pile remained, settling

slowly as the days warmed. At midday the
top layer of snow would melt and trickle
down through the chips; by night it would
freeze hard, gradually changing the snow
within to soft ice. When all the snow in
the woods was gone, that in the chip pile
remained, kept from melting by the thick
wooden blankets that covered it; and the
longest summer would hardly be sufficient
to melt it down to the bottom layer, which
represented the first fall of snow in the
previous autumn.

When I found the spot it was early July.
The sun was blistering hot overhead, and the
flies and mosquitoes were out in myriads ;
but in Mooween's den two or three layers
of ice were as yet unmelted. The hole was
as cold as a refrigerator, and not a fly of any
kind would stay there for a single second.

At the inner end of the den something
glimmered as my eyes grew accustomed to
the gloom, and I reached in my hand and
pulled the thing out It was a stone jug,
and I knew instantly what had held the
molasses that had been spilled on the camp

floor. Mooween had probably pulled the
cork and rolled the jug about, lapping up
the contents as they came out When he
could get no more he had taken the jug
under his arm as he climbed through the
hole in the roof, and kept it now in his cool
den to lick it all over again for any stray
drops of molasses that he might have over-
looked. Perhaps also he found comfort in
putting his tongue or his nose into the
nozzle-mouth to smell the sweetness that
he could no longer reach.

I have found one or two strange winter
dens of Mooween, and have followed his trail
uncounted miles through the snow when he
had been driven out of one kibcmantlum
and was seeking another in the remote fast-
nesses, making an unending trail with the
evident intention of tiring out any hunter
who should attempt to follow him. I have
found his bathing pools repeatedly, and
watched him in midsummer when he
sought out cool retreats — a muddy eddy
in a trout brook under the alders, a mossy
hollow under the north side of a great sheer

i?5
^

ledge — to escape the flies and heat. But
none of them compare with this lumber-
man's ice house which his wits had appro-
priated, and which, from many signs about
the place, he was accustomed to use daily
for his nap when the sun was hottest; and
none of his many queer traits ever appealed
to me quite so strongly as the humorous
cunning which prompted him to take the
jug with him into his den. It was safe
there, whether Mooween were at home or
not, for no bear will ever enter another's
den unless the owner first show him in;
and while other bears were in the hot camp,
trying to find a satisfactory bite of salt pork
and dry flour, Mooween was lying snug in
his ice house licking the molasses jug that
represented his own particular share of the
plunder.

'OSKOMENOS the king-
fisher still burrows in the
earth like his reptile ancestors ; therefore the
other birds call him outcast and will have
nothing to do with him. But he cares little
for that, being a clattering, rattle-headed, self-
satisfied fellow, who seems to do nothing all
day long but fish and eat. As you follow
him, however, you note with amazement that
he does some things marvelously well — bet-
ter indeed than any other of the Wood Folk.
To locate a fish accurately in still water is
difficult enough when one thinks of light
refraction ; but when the fish is moving, and
the sun glares down into the pool and the
wind wrinkles its face into a thousand

flashing, changing furrows and ridges, — then
the bird that can point a bill straight to his
fish and hit him fair -just behind the gills
must have more in his head than the usual
chattering gossip that one hears from him on
the trout streams.

This was the lesson that impressed itself
upon me when I first began to study Koskom-
enos; and the object of this little sketch,
which records those first strong impressions,
is not to give our kingfisher's color or mark-
ings or breeding habits — you can get all
that from the bird books — but to suggest
a possible answer to the question of how he
learns so much, and how he teaches his wis-
dom to the little kingfishers.

Just below my camp, one summer, was
a trout pool. Below the trout pool was a
shaded minnow basin, a kind of storehouse
for the pool above, where the trout foraged
in the early and late twilight, and where,
if you hooked a red-fin delicately on a fine
leader and dropped it in from the crotch of
an overhanging tree, you might sometimes
catch a big one.

"He drove off a mink and almost killed
the savage creature"

Early one morning, while I was sitting in
the tree, a kingfisher swept up the river and
disappeared under the opposite bank. He
had a nest in there, so cunningly hidden
under an overhanging root that till then I
had not discovered it, though I had fished
the pool and seen the kingfishers clattering
about many times. They were unusually noisy
when I was near, and flew up-stream over the
trout pool with a long, rattling call again and
again — a ruse, no doubt, to make me think
that their nest was somewhere far above.

I watched the nest closely after that, in the
intervals when I was not fishing, and learned
many things to fill one with wonder and
respect for this unknown, clattering outcast
of the wilderness rivers. He has devotion
for his mate, and feeds her most gallantly
while she is brooding. He has courage,
plenty of it. One day, under my very eyes,
he drove off a mink and almost killed the
savage creature. He has well-defined fish-
ing regulations and enforces them rigorously,
never going beyond his limits and permitting
no poaching on his own minnow pools. He

also has fishing lore enough in his frowsy
head — if one could get it out — to make
Izaak Walton's discourse like a child's bab-
ble. Whether the wind be south or north-
east, whether the day be dull or bright, he
knows exactly where the little fish will be
found, and how to catch them.

When the young birds came, the most
interesting bit of Koskomenos' life was mani-
fest. One morning as I sat watching, hidden
away in the bushes, the mother kingfisher
put her head out of her hole and looked
about very anxiously. A big water-snake lay
stretched along a stranded log on the shore.
She pounced upon him instantly and drove
him out of sight. Just above, at the foot of
the trout pool, a brood of sheldrake were
croaking and splashing about in the shal-
lows. They were harmless, yet the kingfisher
rushed upon them, clattering and scolding
like a fishwife, and harried them all away
into a quiet bogan.

On the way back she passed over a frog,
a big, sober, sleepy fellow, waiting on
a lily-pad for his sun-bath. Chigwooltz

might catch young trout, and even little birds
as they came to drink, but he would surely
never molest a brood of kingfishers ; yet the
mother, like an irate housekeeper flourishing
her broom at every corner of an unswept
room, sounded her rattle loudly and dropped
on the sleepy frog's head, sending him sput-
tering and scrambling away into the mud, as
if Hawahak the hawk were after him. Then
with another look all round to see that the
stream was clear, and with a warning rattle
to any Wood Folk that she might have
overlooked, she darted into her nest, wig-
gling her tail like a satisfied duck as she
disappeared.

After a moment a wild-eyed young king-
fisher put his head out of the hole for his
first look at the big world. A push from
behind cut short his contemplation, and
without any fuss whatever he sailed down
to a dead branch on the other side of the
stream. Another and another followed in
the same way, as if each one had been told
just what to do and where to go, till the whole
family were sitting a-row, with the rippling

stream below them and the deep blue heavens
and the rustling world of woods above.

That was their first lesson, and their reward
was near. The male bird had been fishing
since daylight; now he began to bring min-
nows from an eddy where he had stored
them, and to feed the hungry family and
assure them, in his own way, that this big
world, so different from the hole in the bank,
was a good place to live in, and furnished no
end of good things to eat.

The next lesson was more interesting, the
lesson of catching fish. The school was a
quiet, shallow pool with a muddy bottom
against which the fish showed clearly, and
with a convenient stub leaning over it from
which to swoop. The old birds had caught
a score of minnows, killed them, and dropped
them here and there under the stub. Then
they brought the young birds, showed them
their game, and told them by repeated exam-
ples to dive and get it. The little fellows
were hungry and took to the sport keenly;
but one was timid, and only after the mother
had twice dived and brought up a fish —

which she showed to the timid one and then
dropped back in a most tantalizing way —
did he muster up resolution to take the

plunge.

A few mornings later, as I prowled along
the shore, I came upon a little pool quite
shut off from the main stream, in which a
dozen or more frightened minnows were
darting about, as if in strange quarters. As
I stood watching them and wondering how
they got over the dry bar that separated the
pool from the river, a kingfisher came sweep-
ing up-stream with a fish in his bill. Seeing
me, he whirled silently and disappeared round
the point below.

The thought of the curious little wild
kindergarten occurred to me suddenly as I
turned to the minnows again, and I waded
across the river and hid in the bushes. After
an hour's wait Koskomenos came stealing
back, looked carefully over the pool and the
river, and swept down-stream with a rattling
call. Presently he came back again with his
mate and the whole family; and the little
ones, after seeing their parents swoop, and

1 88

tasting the fish they caught, began to swoop
for themselves.

The first plunges were usually in vain, and
when a minnow was caught it was undoubt-
edly one of the wounded fish that Koskome-
nos had placed there in the lively swarm to
encourage his little ones. After a try or two,
however, they seemed to get the knack of
the thing and would drop like a plummet,
bill first, or shoot down on a sharp incline
and hit their fish squarely as it darted away
into deeper water. The river was wild and
difficult, suitable only for expert fishermen.
The quietest pools had no fish, and where
minnows were found the \vater or the banks
were against the little kingfishers, who had
not yet learned to hover and take their fish
from the wing. So Koskomenos had found
a suitable pool and stocked it himself to
make his task of teaching more easy for' his
mate and more profitable for his little ones.
The most interesting point in his method
was that, in this case, he had brought the
minnows alive to his kindergarten, instead

killing or wounding them, as in the first

lesson. He knew that the fish could not
get out of the pool, and that his little ones
could take their own time in catching them.

When I saw the family again, weeks after-
wards, their lessons were well learned; they
needed no wounded or captive fish to satisfy
their hunger. They were full of the joy of
living, and showed me, one day, a curious
game, — the only play that I have ever seen
among the kingfishers.

There were three of them, when I first
found them, perched on projecting stubs over
the dancing riffles, which swarmed with chub
and " minnies " and samlets and lively young
red-fins. Suddenly, as if at the command
go ! they all dropped, bill first, into the river.
In a moment they were out again and rushed
back to their respective stubs, where they
threw their heads back and wriggled their
minnows down their throats with a haste to
choke them all. That done, they began to
dance about on their stubs, clattering and
chuckling immoderately.

It was all blind to me at first, till the game
was repeated two or three times, always

starting at the same instant with a plunge
into the riffles and a rush back to goal.
Then their object was as clear as the stream
below them. With plenty to eat and never
a worry in the world, they were playing a
game to see which could first get back to his
perch and swallow his fish. Sometimes one
or two of them failed to get a fish and glided
back dejectedly ; sometimes all three w^ere so
close together that it took a deal of jabber to
straighten the matter out; and they always
ended in the same way, by beginning all
over again.

Koskomenos is a solitary fellow, with few
pleasures, and fewer companions to share
them with him. This is undoubtedly the re-
sult of his peculiar fishing regulations, which
give to each kingfisher a certain piece of lake
or stream for his own. Only the young of
the same family go fishing together; and so
I have no doubt that these were the same
birds whose early training I had watched,
and who were now enjoying themselves in
their own way, as all the other Wood Folk
do, in the fat, careless, happy autumn days.

EKOMPF the wildcat is

(•-^X/'X/X"^1'

one of the savage beasts ***t^
that have not yet vanished from the
haunts of men. Sometimes, as you
clamber up the wooded hillside above the
farm, you will come suddenly upon a fierce-
looking, catlike creature stretched out on a
rock sunning himself. At sight of you he
leaps up with a snarl, and you have a swift
instant in which to take his measure. He
is twice as big as a house-cat, with round
head and big expressionless eyes that glare
straight into yours with a hard, greenish glit-
ter. His reddish-brown sides are spotted

194

here and there, and the white fur of his
belly is blotched with black — the better to
hide himself amid the lights and shadows.
A cat, sure enough, but unlike anything of
the kind you have ever seen before.

As you look and wonder there is a faint
sound that you will do well to heed. The
muscles of his long thick legs are working
nervously, and under the motion is a warn-
ing purr, not the soft rumble in a contented
tabby's throat, but the cut and rip of ugly
big claws as they are unsheathed viciously
upon the dry leaves. His stub tail is twitch-
ing— you had not noticed it before, but now
it whips back and forth angrily, as if to call
attention to the fact that Nature had not
altogether forgotten that end of Pekompf.
ip, whip, — it is a tail — Kyaaaah ! And
you jump as the fierce creature
screeches in your face.

If it is your first wildcat, you
will hardly know what to do, — to
stand perfectly quiet is always best,
unless you have a stick or gun in

'?^&rt^&2^ ^^Jy

•"*- 5

^

your hand, — and if you have met Pekompt
many times before, you are quite as uncer-
tain what he will do this time. Most wild
creatures, however fierce, prefer to mind their
own business and will respect the same senti-
ment in you. But when you stumble upon
a wildcat you are never sure of his next
move. That is because he is a slinking,
treacherous creature, like all cats, and never
quite knows how best to meet you. He sus-
pects you unreasonably because he knows
you suspect him with reason. Generally he
slinks away, or leaps suddenly for cover,
according to the method of your approach.
But though smaller he is naturally more sav-
age than either the Canada lynx or the pan-
ther, and sometimes he crouches and snarls
in your face, or even jumps for your chest at
the first movement.

Once, to my knowledge, he fell like a fury
upon the shoulders of a man who was hurry-
ing homeward through the twilight, and who
happened to stop unawares under the tree
where Pekompf was watching the runways.
The man had no idea that a wildcat was near,

and he probably never would have known
had he gone steadily on his way. As he told
me afterwards, he felt a sudden alarm and
stopped to listen. The moment he did so
the savage creature above him thought him-
self discovered, and leaped to carry the war
into Africa. There was a pounce, a screech, a
ripping of cloth, a wild yell for help; then the
answering shout and rush of two woodsmen
with their axes. And that night Pekompf's
skin was nailed to the barn-door to dry in the
sun before being tanned and made up into a
muff for the woodsman's little girl to warm
her fingers withal in the bitter winter weather.
Where civilization has driven most of his
fellows away, Pekompf is a shy, silent crea-
ture; but \vhere the farms are scattered and
the hillsides wild and wooded, he is bolder
and more noisy than in the unpeopled wilder-
ness. From the door of the charcoal-burner's
hut in the Connecticut hills you may still hear
him screeching and fighting with his fellows
as the twilight falls, and the yowling uproar
causes a colder chill in your back than any-
thing you will ever hear in the wilderness.

As you follow the trout stream, from which
the charcoal man daily fills his kettle, you
may find Pekompf stretched on a fallen log
under the alders, glaring intently into the
trout pool, waiting, waiting — for what ?

It will take many seasons of watching to
answer this natural question, w^hich every
one W7ho is a follower of the wild things has
asked himself a score of times. All the cats
have but one form of patience, the patience
of quiet waiting. Except when hunger-driven,
their way of hunting is to watch beside the
game paths or crouch upon a big limb above
the place where their game comes down to
drink. Sometimes they vary their programme
by prowling blindly through the woods, singly
or in pairs, trusting to luck to blunder upon
their game; for they are wretched hunters.
They rarely follow a
trail, not simply because

ti

their noses are not keen — for in the snow,
with a trail as plain as a deer path, they
break away from it with reckless impatience,
only to scare the game into a headlong dash
for safety. Then they will crouch under a
dwarf spruce and stare at the trail with round
unblinking eyes, waiting for the frightened
creatures to come back, or for other creatures
to come by in the same footprints. Even in
teaching her young a mother wildcat is full
of snarling whims and tempers ; but now let a
turkey gobble far away in the woods, let Mus-
quash dive into his den where she can see
it, let but a woodmouse whisk out cf sight
into his hidden doorway, — and instantly
patience returns to Pekompf. All the snarl-
ing ill-temper vanishes. She crouches and
waits, and forgets all else. She
may have just fed full on what she
likes best, and so have
no desire for food and
no expectation of catch-
ing more ; but she must
still watch, as if to

reassure herself that her eyes are not deceived

I QQ

and that Tookhees is really there under the
mossy stone where she saw the scurry of his
little legs and heard his frightened squeak as
he disappeared. Cunn

But why should a cat watch at a trout
pool, out of which nothing ever comes to
reward his patience ? That was a puzzling
question for many years. I had seen Pekompf
many times stretched on a log, or lying close
to a great rock over the water, so intent on
his watching that he heard not my cautious
approach. Twice from my canoe I had seen
Upweekis the lynx on the shore of a wilder-
ness lake, crouched among the weather-worn
roots of a stranded pine, his great paws
almost touching the water, his eyes fixed
with unblinking stare on the deep pool below.
And once, when trout fishing on a wild river
just opposite a great jam of logs and drift-
wood, I had stopped casting suddenly with
an uncanny feeling of being watched by
unseen eyes at my solitary sport.

It is always well to heed such a warning
in the woods. I looked up and down quickly ;

2OO

but the river held no life above its hurrying
flood. I searched the banks carefully and
peered suspiciously into the woods behind
me; but save for the dodging of a winter
wren, who seems always to be looking for
something that he has lost and that he does
not want you to know about, the shores were
wild and still as if just created. I whipped
out my flies again. What was that, just be-
yond the little wavelet where my Silver Doc-
tor had fallen? Something moved, curled,
flipped and twisted nervously. It was a tail,
the tip end that cannot be quiet. And there
— an irrepressible chill trickled over me as I
made out the outlines of a great gray beast
stretched on a fallen log,
and caught the gleam of

his wild eyes fixed steadily upon me. Even
as I saw the thing it vanished like a shadow
of the woods. But what was the panther
watching there before he watched me?

The answer came unexpectedly. It was
in the Pemigewasset valley in midsummer.
At daybreak I had come softly down the
wood road to the trout pool and stopped to
watch a mink dodging in and out along the
shore. When he passed out of sight under
some logs I waited quietly for other Wood
Folk to show themselves. A slight move-
ment on the end of a log — and there was
Pekompf, so still that the eye could hardly
find him, stretching a paw down cautiously
and flipping it back with a peculiar inward
sweep. Again he did it, and I saw the long
curved claws, keen as fish-hooks, stretched
wide out of their sheaths. He was fishing,
spearing his prey with the patience of an
Indian; and even as I made the discovery
there was a flash of silver following the
quick jerk of his paw, and Pekompf leaped
to the shore and crouched over the fish that
he had thrown out of the water.

So Pekompf watches the pools as he
watches a squirrel's hole,, because he has
seen game there and because he likes fish
above everything else that the woods can
furnish. But how often must he watch the
big trout before he catches one? Sometimes,
in the late twilight, the largest fish will move
out of the pools and nose along the shore
for food, their back fins showing out of the
shallow water as they glide along. It may
be that Pekompf sometimes catches them at
this time, and so when he sees the gleam of
a fish in the depths he crouches where he is
for a while, following the irresistible impulse
of all cats at the sight of game. Herein
they differ from all other savage beasts,
which, when not hungry, pay no attention
whatever to smaller animals.

It may be, also, that Pekompf 's cunning is
deeper than this. Old Noel, a Micmac hunter,
tells me that both wildcat and lynx, whose
cunning is generally the cunning of stupidity,
have discovered a remarkable way of catch-
ing fish. They will lie with their heads close
to the water, their paws curved for a quick

f^^^^B^d^*.s,

' A flash of silver following the quick
jerk of his paw "

V j-% ».*i4.f'< N-

grab, their eyes half shut to deceive the fish,

and their whiskers just touching and playing

with the surface. Their general color blends ^^^^ ^

with that of their surroundings and hides

them perfectly. The trout, noticing the

slight crinkling of the water where the long

whiskers touch it, but not separating the

crouching animal from the log or rock 'on

which he rests, rise to the surface, as is their

wont when feeding, and are snapped out by

a lightning sweep of the paws.

Whether this be so or not I am not sure.
The raccoon undoubtedly catches crabs and
little fish in this way; and I have sometimes
surprised cats — both wildcats and Canada
lynxes, as well as domestic tabbies — with their
heads down close to the water, so still that they
seemed part of the log or rock on which they
crouched. Once I tried for five minutes to
make a guide see a big lynx that was lying
on a root in plain sight within thirty yards of
our canoe, while the guide assured me in a
whisper that he could see perfectly and that
it was only a stump. Then, hearing us, the
lynx rose, stared, and leaped for the brush.

206

Such hiding would easily deceive even a
trout, for I have often taken my position at
the edge of a jam and after lying perfectly
still for ten minutes have seen the wary fish
rise from under the logs to investigate a straw
or twig that I held in my fingers and with
which I touched the water here and there,
like an insect at play.

So Old Noel is probably right when he
says that Pekompf fishes with his whiskers,
for the habits of both fish and cats seem
to carry out his observations.

But deeper than
his cunning is

Pekompf's in-

'•* i •

)••* born suspicion

and his insane fury
at being opposed or
cornered. The trap-
pers catch him, as
they catch his big
cousin the lucivee, by setting a snare in the
rabbit paths that he nightly follows. Opposite
the noose and attached to the other end of the
cord is a pole, which jumps after the cat as he

starts forward with the loop about his neck.
Were it a fox, now, he would back away out
of the snare, or lie still and cut the cord with
his teeth and so escape. But, like all cats
when trapped, Pekompf flies into a blind fury.
He screeches at the unoffending stick, claws
it, battles with it, and literally chokes himself
in his rage. Or, if he be an old cat and his
cunning a bit deeper, he will go off cautiously
and climb the biggest tree he can find, with
the uncomfortable thing that he is tied to
dangling and clattering behind him. When
near the top he will leave the stick hanging
on one side of a limb while he cunningly
climbs down the other, thinking thus to fool
his dumb enemy and leave him behind. One
of two things always happens. Either the
stick catches in the crotch and Pekompf
hangs himself on his own gibbet, or else it
comes over with a sudden jerk and falls to
the ground, pulling Pekompf with it and
generally killing him in the fall.

It is a cruel, brutal kind of device at best,
and fortunately for the cat tribe has almost
vanished from the northern woods, except in

208

the far Northwest, where the half-breeds still
use it for lynx successfully. But as a study
of the way in which trappers seize upon
some peculiarity of an animal and use it for
his destruction, it has no equal.

That Pekompf's cunning is of the cat kind,
suspicious without being crafty or intelligent
like that of the fox or wolf, is curiously
shown by a habit which both lynx and wild-
cat have in common, namely, that of carrying
anything they steal to the top of some lofty
evergreen to devour it. When they catch a
rabbit or fish fairly themselves, they gener-
ally eat it on the spot; but when they steal
the same animal from snare or cache, or from
some smaller hunter, the cat suspicion returns
— together with some dim sense of wrong-
doing, which all animals feel more or less —
and they make off with the booty and eat it
greedily where they think no one will ever
find them.

Once, when watch-
ing for days under a
fish-hawk's nest to see
the animals that came

<s»;

in shyly to eat the scraps that the little fish-
hawks cast out when their hunger was satis-
fied, this cat habit was strikingly manifest.
Other animals would come in and quietly eat
what they found and slip away again ; but
the cats would seize on a morsel with flash-
ing eyes, as if defying all law and order, and
would either growl horribly as they ate or
else would slink away guiltily and, as I found
out by following, would climb the biggest
tree at hand and eat the morsel in the high-
est crotch that gave a foothold. And once,
on the Maine coast in November, I saw a
fierce battle in the tree-tops where a wildcat
crouched, snarling like twenty fiends, while
a big eagle whirled and swooped over him,
trying to take away the game that Pekompf
had stolen.

By far the most curious bit of Pekompf's
cunning came under my eyes, one summer,
a few years ago. Until recently I had sup-
posed it to be a unique discovery; but last
summer a friend, who goes to Newfoundland
every year for the salmon fishing, had a simi-
lar experience with a Canada lynx, which

emphasizes the tendency of all cats to seek
the tree-tops with anything that they have
stolen; though curiously enough I have never
found any trace of it with game that they
had caught honestly themselves. It was in
Nova Scotia, where I was trout fishing for
a little season, and where I had no idea of
meeting Pekompf, for the winters are severe
there and the wildcat is supposed to leave
such places to his more powerful and longer-
legged cousin, the lynx, whose feet are bigger
than his and better padded for walking on
the snow. Even in the southern Berkshires
you may follow Pekompf's trail and see where
he makes heavy weather of it, floundering
belly-deep like a domestic tabby through the
soft drifts in his hungry search for grouse
and rabbits, and lying down in despair at last
to wait till the snow settles. But to my sur-
prise Pekompf was there, bigger, fiercer, and
more cunning than I had ever seen him;
though I did not discover this till after a
long search.

I had fished from
dawn till almost six

o'clock, one morning, and had taken two
good trout, which were all that the stream
promised ' to yield for the day. Then I
thought of a little pond in the woods over the
mountain, which looked trouty when I had
discovered it and which, so far a's I knew,
had never been fished with a fly. Led more
by the fun of exploring than by the expecta-
tion of fish, I started to try the new waters.

The climb through the woods promised to
be a hard one, so I left everything behind
except rod, reel, and fly-book. My coat was
hung on the nearest bush; the landing-net
lay in the shade across a rock, the end of the
handle wedged under a root, and I dropped
my two trout into that and covered them from
the sun with ferns and moss. Then I started
off through the woods for the little pond.

When I came back empty-handed, a few
hours later, trout and landing-net were gone.
The first thought naturally was that some
one had stolen them, and I looked for the
thief's tracks; but, save my own, there was
not a footprint anywhere beside the stream
up or down. Then I looked beside the rock

more carefully and found bits of moss and

212

fish-scales, and the pugs of some animal, too
faint in the gravel to make out what the
beast was that made them. I followed the
faint traces for a hundred yards or more into
the woods till they led me to a great spruce
tree, under which every sign disappeared
utterly, as if the creature had suddenly flown
away net and all, and I gave up the trail
without any idea of what had made it.

For two weeks that theft bothered me. It
was not so much the loss of my two trout
and net, but rather the loss of my woodcraft
on the trail that had no end, which kept me
restless. The net was a large one, altogether
too large and heavy for trout fishing. At
the last moment before starting on my trip I
found that my trout net was rotten and use-
less, and so had taken the only thing at hand,
a specially made forty-inch net which I had
last used on a scientific expedition for collect-
ing specimens from the lakes of northern
New Brunswick. The handle was long, and
the bow, as I had more than once tested, was
powerful enough to use instead of a gaff for

2I3

taking a twenty-five pound salmon out of his
pool after he had been played to a standstill;
and how any creature could drag it off through
the woods without leaving a plain trail for
my eyes to follow puzzled me, and excited a CurihL
most lively curiosity to know who he was
and why he had not eaten the fish where he
found them. Was it lynx or stray wolf, or
had the terrible Injun Devil that is still
spoken of with awe at the winter firesides
returned to his native woods ? For a week
I puzzled over the question; then I went
back to the spot and tried in vain to follow
the faint marks in the moss. After that when-
ever I wandered near the spot I tried the trail
again, or circled wider and wider through
the woods, hoping to find the net or some
positive sign of the beast that had stolen it.
One day in the woods it occurred to me
suddenly that, while I had followed
the trail three or four
times, I had never
thought to examine the
tree beneath which it
ended. At the thought

I went to the big spruce and there, sure
enough, were flecks of bright brown here
and there where the rough outer shell had
been chipped off. And there also, glimmer-
ing white, was a bit of dried slime where a
fish had rested for an instant against the bark.
The beast, whatever he was, had climbed the
tree with his booty; and the discovery was no
sooner made than I was shinning up eagerly
after him.

Near the scraggy top I found my net, its
long handle wedged firmly in between two
branches, its bow caught on a projecting
stub, its bag hanging down over empty space.
In the net was a big wildcat, his round head
driven through a hole which he had bitten
in the bottom, the tough meshes drawn taut
as fiddle-strings about his throat. All four
legs had clawed or pushed their way through
the mesh, till every kick and struggle served
only to bind and choke him more effectually.

From marks I made out at last the outline
of the story. Pekompf had found the fish
and tried to steal them, but his suspicions
were roused by the queer net and the

clattering handle. With true lynx cunning,
which is always more than half stupidity, he
had carried it off and started to climb the
biggest tree he could find. Near the top the
handle had wedged among the branches, and
while he tried to dislodge it net and fish had
swung clear of the trunk. In the bark below
the handle I found where he had clung to
the tree boll and tried to reach the swinging
trout with his paw; and on a branch above
the bow were marks which showed where he
had looked down longingly at the fish at the
bottom of the net, just below his hungry
nose. From this branch he had either
fallen or, more likely, in a fit of blind
rage had leaped into the net,
which closed around him and
held him more effectually than
bars of iron. When I came under the tree
for the first time, following his trail, he was
probably crouched on a limb over my head
watching me steadily; and when I came
back the second time he was dead.

That was all that one could be sure
about. But here and there, in a torn

215

, mesh, or a tuft of fur, or the rip of a claw
against a swaying twig, were the marks of a
struggle whose savage intensity one could
Cunning Only imagine.

kOST people have seen .
a sick cat eat grass, or an
uneasy dog seek out some
weed and devour it greedily to make his
complaining stomach feel better. Some few
may have read John Wesley's directions on
the art of keeping well — which have not,
however, found their way into his book of
discipline for the soul — and have noted with
surprised interest his claim that many medi-
cines in use among the common people and
the physicians of his time were discovered
by watching the animals that sought out
these things to heal their diseases. " If

2I9

they heal animals they will also heal men,"
is his invincible argument. Others may
have Dipped deep into Indian history and
folk-lore and learned that many of the herbs
used by the American tribes, and especially
the cures for rheumatism, dysentery, fever,
and snake bites, were learned direct from
the animals, by noting the rheumatic old
bear grub for fern roots or bathe in the hot
mud of a sulphur spring, and by watching
with eager eyes what plants the wild crea-
tures ate when bitten by rattlers or wasted
by the fever. Still others have been fasci-
nated with the first crude medical knowledge
of the Greeks, which came to them from
the East undoubtedly, and have read that the
guarded mysteries of the Asclepiades, the
healing cult that followed ^Esculapius, had
among them many simple remedies that had
first proved their efficacy among animals in
a natural state; and that Hippocrates, the
greatest physician of antiquity, whose fame
under the name of Bokrat the Wise went
down through Arabia and into the farthest
deserts, owes many of his medical aphorisms

Escaped at last by swimming
an icy river "

to what he himself, or his forebears, must
have seen out of doors among the wild
creatures. And all these seers and readers
have perhaps wondered how much the ani-
mals knew, and especially how they came to
know it.

To illustrate the matter simply and in our
own day and generation: A deer that has
been chased all day long by dogs, and that
has escaped at last by swimming an icy river
and fallen exhausted on the farther shore,
will lie down to sleep in the snow. That
would mean swift death for any human
being. Half the night the deer will move
about at short intervals, instead of sleeping
heavily, and in the morning he is as good
as ever and ready for another run. The
same deer shut up in a warm barn to sleep
overnight, as has been more than once
tested with park animals, will be found dead
in the morning.

Here is a natural law of healing suggested,
which, if noted among the Greeks and In-
dians, would have been adopted instantly as
a method of dealing with extreme cold and

exhaustion, or with poisoning resulting in pa-
ralysis of the muscles. Certainly the method,
if somewhat crude, might still have wrought
enough cures to be looked upon with venera-
tion by a people who unfortunately had no
knowledge of chemical drugs, or Scotch
whisky, or sugar pellets with an ethereal
suggestion of intangible triturations some-
where in the midst of them.

That the animals do practice at times a
rude kind of medicine and surgery upon
themselves is undeniable. The only ques-
tion about it is, How do they know? To
say it is a matter of instinct is but begging
the question. It is also three-fourths fool-
ishness, for many of the things that animals
do are beyond the farthest scope of instinct.
The case of the deer that moved about and
so saved his life, instead of sleeping on
heavily to his death, may be partly a case
of instinct. Personally it seems to me more
a matter °f experience ;
for a fawn under the
same circumstances,
unless his mother were

Yl

near to keep him moving, would undoubtedly
lie down and die. More than that, it seems
to be largely a matter of obedience to the
strongest impulse of the moment, to which
all animals are accustomed or trained from
their birthday. And that is not quite the
same thing as instinct, unless one is disposed &
to go to the extreme of Berkeley's philosophy
and make instinct a kind of spirit-personality
that watches over animals all the time. Often
the knowledge of healing or of primitive sur-
gery seems to be the discovery or possession
of a few rare individual animals, instead of
being spread widecast among the species, as
instincts are. This knowledge, or what-you-
may-call-it, is sometimes shared, and so hints
at a kind of communication among animals,
of whose method we catch only fleeting
glimpses and suggestions — but that will be
the subject of another article. The object
of this is, not to answer the questions of
how or whence, but simply to suggest one
or two things I have seen in the woods
as the basis for further and more detailed
observations.

The most elemental kind of surgery is that
which amputates a leg when it is broken, not
always or often, but only when the wound
festers from decay or fly-bite and so endan-
gers the whole body. Probably the best
illustration of this is found in the coon, who
has a score of traits that place him very high
among intelligent animals. When a coon's
foot is shattered by a bullet he will cut it
off promptly and wash the stump in running
water, partly to reduce the inflammation and
partly, no doubt, to make it perfectly clean.
As it heals he uses his tongue on the wound
freely, as a dog does, to cleanse it perhaps,
and by the soft massage of his tongue to
reduce the swelling and allay the pain.
•jjjp. So far this may or may not be pure in-
stinct. For I do not know,, and who will
tell me, whether a child puts his wounded
hand to his mouth and sucks and cleanses
the hurt by pure instinct, or because he has
seen others do it, or because he has had
his hurts kissed away in childhood, and so
imitates the action unconsciously when his
mother is not near?

Most mother animals tongue their little
ones freely. Now is that a caress, or is it
some hygienic measure begun at birth, when
she devours all traces of the birth-envelopes
and licks the little ones clean lest the nose
of some hungry prowler bring him near to
destroy the family? Certainly the young
are conscious of the soft tongue that rubs
them fondly, and so when they lick their
own wounds it may be only a memory and
an imitation, — two factors, by the way, which
lie at the bottom of all elemental education.
That explanation, of course, leaves the am-
putated leg out of the question; and the
surgery does not stop here.

When a boy, and still barbarian enough
to delight in trapping, partly from a love of
the chase that was born in me, and partly
to put money into a boy's empty pocket, I
once caught a muskrat in a steel trap that
slid off into deep water at the first pull and
so drowned the creature mercifully. This
was due to the careful instructions of Natty
Dingle, at whose feet I sat to learn wood-
craft, and who used the method to save all

his pelts ; for often an animal, when caught
in a trap, will snap the bone by a twist of

his body and then cut the jeg off wjth his

teeth, and so escape, leaving his foot in the
trap's jaws. This is common enough among
fur-bearing animals to excite no comment;
and it is sad now to remember that some-
times I would find animals drowned in my
traps, that had previously suffered at the
hands of other trappers.

I remember especially one big musquash
that I was going to shoot near one of my
traps, when I stopped short at noticing some
queer thing about him. The trap was set
in shallow water where a path made by
muskrats came up out of the river into the
grass. Just over the trap was a turnip on
a pointed stick to draw the creature's atten-
tion and give him something to anticipate
until he should put his foot on the deadly
pan beneath. But the old musquash avoided
the path, as if he had suffered in such places
before. Instead of following the ways of
his ancestors he came out at another spot
behind the trap, and I saw with horrible

regret that he had cut off both his fore legs,
probably at different times, when he had
been twice caught in man's abominable
inventions. When he came up out of the
stream he rose on his hind legs and waddled
through the grass like a bear or a monkey,
for he had no fore feet to rest upon. He
climbed a tussock beside the bait with im-
mense caution, pulled in the turnip with his
two poor stumps of forearms, ate it where he
was, and slipped back into the stream again ;
while the boy watched with a new wonder
in the twilight, and forgot all about the gun
as he tended his traps.

It does not belong with my story, but that
night the traps came in, and never went out
again ; and I can never pass a trap now any-
where without poking a stick into it to save
some poor innocent leg.

All this is digression; and I have almost
forgotten my surgery and the particular
muskrat I was talking about. He, too, had
been caught in some other fellow's trap
and had bitten his leg off only a few days
before. The wound was not yet healed,

229

and the amazing thing about it was that
he had covered it with some kind of sticky

vegetable gum, probably from some pine-tree
Surgery ^^ j^d been Sp]jt or barked close to the
""«,«. ground where Musquash could reach it easily.

"He had smeared it thickly all over the wound
and well up the leg above it, so that all dirt and
even all air and water were excluded perfectly.
An old Indian who lives and hunts on
Vancouver Island told me recently that he
has several times caught beaver that had
previously cut their legs off to escape from
traps, and that two of them had covered the
wounds thickly with gum, as the muskrat
had done. Last spring the same Indian
caught a bear in a deadfall. On the ani-
mal's side was a long rip from some other
bear's claw, and the wound had been smeared
thickly with soft spruce resin. This last
experience corresponds closely with one of
my own. I shot a big bear, years ago, in
northern New Brunswick, that had received
a gunshot wound, which had raked him
badly and then penetrated the leg. He

^ had plugged the wound carefully with clay,

evidently to stop the bleeding, and then had
covered the broken skin with sticky mud
from the river's brink, to keep the flies away
from the wound and give it a chance to heal
undisturbed. It is noteworthy here that the
bear uses either gum or clay indifferently,
while the beaver and muskrat seem to know
enough to avoid the clay, which would be
quickly washed off in the water.

Here are a few incidents, out of a score
or more that I have seen, or heard from reli-
able hunters, that indicate something more
than native instinct among animals. When
I turn to the birds the incidents are fewer
but more remarkable; for the birds, being
lower in the scale of life, are more subject
to instinct than are the animals, and so are
less easily taught by their mothers, and are
slower to change their natural habits to meet
changing conditions.

This is, of course, a very general state-
ment and is subject to endless exceptions.
The finches that, when transported to Aus-
tralia from England, changed the style of
their nests radically and now build in a

fashion entirely different from that of their
parents; the little goldfinch of New Eng-
land that win build a false bottom to her
nesj. fo cover Up the egg Of a cow-bird that
has been left to hatch among her own; the
grouse that near the dwellings of men are
so much wilder and keener than their breth-
ren of the wilderness; the swallows that
adopt the chimneys and barns of civilization
instead of the hollow trees and clay banks
of their native woods, — all these and a score
of others show how readily instinct is modi-
fied among the birds, and how the young
are taught a wisdom that their forefathers
never knew. Nevertheless it is true, I think,
that instincts are generally sharper with them
than with animals, and the following cases
suggest all the more strongly that we must
look beyond instinct to training and indi-
vidual discovery to account for many things
among the feathered folk.

The most wonderful bit of bird surgery
that has ever come to my attention is that
of the woodcock that set his broken leg in
a clay cast, as related in a previous chapter ;

but there is one other almost as remarkable
that opens up a question that is even harder
to answer. One day in the early spring I
saw two eider-ducks swimming about the
Hummock Pond on the island of Nantucket.
The keen-eyed critic will interfere here and
say I was mistaken ; for eiders are salt-water
ducks that haunt only the open sea and are
supposed never to enter fresh water, not
even to breed. That is what I also sup-
posed until I saw these two; so I sat down
to watch a while and find out, if possible,
what had caused them to change their
habits. At this time of year the birds are
almost invariably found in pairs, and some-
times a flock a hundred yards long will pass
you, flying close to the water and sweeping
around the point where you are watching,
first a pretty brown female and then a gor-
geous black-and-white drake just behind her,
alternating with perfect regularity, female and
male, throughout the whole length of the
long line. The two birds before me, however,

were both females ; and ^=ri

that was another reason -

for watching them instead of the hundreds
of other ducks, coots and sheldrakes and

broadbills that were scattered all over the

Surgery big pond

" ~ »**• The first thing noticed was that the birds
were acting queerly, dipping their heads
under water and keeping them there for a
full minute or more at a time. That was
also curious, for the water under them was
too deep for feeding, and the eiders prefer
to wait till the tide falls and then gather the
exposed shellfish from the rocks, rather than
to dive after them like a coot. Darkness
came on speedily to hide the birds, who were
still dipping their heads as if bewitched, and
I went away no wiser for my watching.

A few weeks later there was another eider,
a big drake, in the same pond, behaving in
the same queer way. Thinking perhaps that
this was a wounded bird that had gone crazy
from a shot in the head, I pushed out after
him in an old tub of a boat; but he took
wing at my approach, like any other duck,
and after a vigorous flight lit farther down
the pond and plunged his head under water

\

again. Thoroughly curious now, I went on
a still hunt after the stranger, and after much
difficulty succeeded in shooting him from the
end of a bushy point. The only unusual
thing about him was that a large mussel,
such as grow on the rocks in salt water, had
closed his shells firmly on the bird's tongue
in such a way that he could neither be
crushed by the bird's bill nor scratched off
by the bird's foot. I pulled the mussel off,
put it in my pocket, and went home more
mystified than before.

That night I hunted up an old fisherman,
who had a big store of information in his
head about all kinds of wild things, and
asked him if he had ever seen a shoal-duck
in fresh water. " Once or twice," he said ;
" they kept dipping their heads under water,
kinder crazy like." But he had no explana-
tion to offer until I showed him the mussel
that I had found on the duck's tongue.
Then his face lightened. " Mussels of that
kind won't live in fresh water," he declared
at a glance ; and then the explanation of the
birds' queer actions flashed into both our heads

, at once : the eiders were simply drowning the
mussels in order to make them loosen their

grip and release the captive tongues.
^ Surgery This is undoubtedly the true explanation,
*"* - ^ as I made sure by testing the mussels in
fresh water and by watching the birds more
closely at their feeding. All winter they
may be found along our coasts, where they
feed on the small shellfish that cover the
ledges. As the tide goes down they swim
in from the shoals, where they rest in scat-
tered flocks, and chip the mussels from the
ledges, swallowing them shells and all. A
score of times I have hidden among the
rocks of the jetty with a few wooden decoys

., % in front of me, and watched the eiders come

/... ,,'">•- '} in to feed. They would approach the decoys
f.j rapidly, lifting their wings repeatedly as a
kind of salutation ; then, angered apparently
-7 that they were not welcomed by the same
signal of uplifted wings, they would swim up
to the wooden frauds and peck them sav-
agely here and there, and then leave them
in disgust and scatter among the rocks at

my feet, paying

little attention to me as long as I kept per-
fectly still. For they are much tamer than
other wild ducks, and are, unfortunately,
slow to believe that man is their enemy.

I noticed another curious thing while
watching them and hoping that by some
chance I might see one caught by a mussel.
When a flock was passing high overhead, any
sudden noise — a shout, or the near report of
a gun — would make the whole flock swoop
down like a flash close to the water. Plover
have the same habit when they first arrive
from Labrador, but I have hunted in vain for
any satisfactory explanation of the thing.

As the birds feed a mussel will sometimes
close his shells hard on some careless duck's
tongue or bill in such a way that he cannot
be crushed or swallowed or broken against
the rocks. In that case the bird, if he knows
the secret, will fly to fresh water and drown
his tormentor. Whether all the ducks have
this wisdom, or whether it is confined to a
few rare birds, there is no present means of
knowing. I have seen three different eiders
practice this bit of surgery myself, and have

heard of at least a dozen more, all of the same
species, that were seen in fresh ponds or
rivers, dipping their heads under water re-
peatedly. In either case two interesting ques-
tions suggest themselves: first, How did a
bird whose whole life from birth to death is
spent on the sea first learn that certain mus-
sels will drown in fresh water? and, second,
How do the other birds know it now, when
the need arises unexpectedly ?

man who hunts
with gun or camera has

his reward. He has also his labors, vexa-
tions, and failures ; and these are the price he
pays for his success. The man who hunts
without either gun or camera has, it seems
to me, a much greater reward, and has it
without price. Of him more than any other
Nimrod may be said what a returned mis-
sionary from Africa said of his first congre-
gation, " They are a contented folk, clothed

Without,
a Gun

with the sunlight and fed by gravitation."
Hunting without a gun is, therefore, the
sport of a peaceful man, a man who goes to
the woods for rest and for letting his soul
grow, and who after a year of worry and
work is glad to get along without either for
a little season. As he glides over the water-
ways in his canoe, or loafs leisurely along
the trail, he carries no weight of gun or tri-
pod or extra plates. Glad to be alive him-
self, he has no pleasure in the death of the
wild things. Content just to see and hear
and understand, he has no fret or sweat to
get the sun just right and calculate his exact
thirty-foot distance and then to fume and
swear, as I have heard good men do, because
the game fidgets, or the clouds obscure the
sun, or the plates are not quick enough, or —
beginning of sorrows! — because he finds
after the game has fled that the film he has
just used on a bull moose had all its good
qualities already preempted by a landscape
and a passing canoe.

I have no desire to decry any kind of legit-
imate hunting, for I have tried them all and

The bear and her cubs are gathering blueberries
in their greedy, funny way"

the rewards are good. I simply like hunting
without a gun or camera better than all other

forms of hunting for three good reasons:
first, because it is lazy and satisfying, perfect
for summer weather; second, because it has ^IK**
no troubles, no vexations, no disappointments,
and so is good for a man who has wrestled
long enough with these things; and third,
because it lets you into the life and individu-
ality of the wild animals as no other hunting
can possibly do, since you approach them
with a mind at ease and, having no excite-
ment about you, they dare to show them-
selves natural and unconcerned, or even a
bit curious about you to know who you are
and what you are doing. It has its thrills
and excitements too, as much or as little as
you like. To creep up through the brulee to
where the bear and her cubs are gathering
blueberries in their greedy, funny way; to
paddle silently upon a big moose while his
head is under water and only his broad ant-
lers show; to lie at ease beside the trail
flecked with sunlight and shadow and have
the squirrels scamper across your legs, or the

lO/fhout
a Gun

wild bird perch inquisitively upon your toe,
or — rarest sight in the woods in the early
morning — to have a fisher twist by you in
intense, weasel-like excitement, puzzling out
the trail of the hare or grouse that passed
you an hour ago ; to steal along the water-
ways alone on a still dark night and open
your jack silently upon ducks or moose or
mother deer and her fawns, — there is joy
and tingle enough in all these things to sat-
isfy any lover of the woods. There is also
wisdom to be found, especially when you

remember that
these are indi-
vidual animals
that no human
eyes have ever
before looked
upon, that they
are different
every one, and that at any
moment they may reveal some
queer trick or trait of animal
life that no naturalist has ever
before seen.

Last summer, just below my camp on
Matagammon, was a little beach between
two points surrounded by dense woods that
the deer seemed to love better than any
other spot on the whole lake. When we first
arrived the deer were close about our camp.
From the door we could sometimes see them
on the lake shore, and every evening at twi-
light they would steal up shyly to eat the
potato and apple parings. Gradually the
noises of camp drove them far back on the
ridges, though on stormy nights they would
come back when the camp was still and all
lights out. From my tent 'I would hear
cautious rustlings or the crack of a twig
above the drip and pour of raindrops on my
tent-fly, and stealing out in the darkness
would find two or three deer, generally a doe
and her fawns, standing under the split roof
of our \voodshed to escape the pelting rain.

The little beach was farther away, across
an arm of the lake and out of sight and sound
of our camp, so the deer never deserted it,
though we watched them there every day.
Just wrhy they liked it I could never discover.

A score of beaches on the lake were larger
and smoother, and a dozen at least offered
better feeding; but the deer came here in
greater numbers than anywhere else. Near-by
was a great wild meadow, with dense hiding-
places on the slopes beyond, where deer were
numerous. Before the evening feeding began
in the wild meadow they would come out to
this little beach and play for an hour or so ;
and .1 have no doubt the place was a regular
playground, such as rabbits and foxes and
crows, and indeed most wild animals, choose
for their hours of fun.

Once, at early twilight, I lay in hiding
among some old roots at the end of this
little beach, watching a curious game. Eight
or ten deer, does and fawns and young spike
bucks, had come out into the open and were
now running rapidly in three circles arranged
in a line, so, cQo. In the middle was a big
circle some fifteen feet in diameter, and at
opposite sides were two smaller circles less
than half the diameter of the first, as I found
afterwards by measuring from the tracks.
Around one of these small circles the deer

ran from right to left invariably ; around the
other they ran from left to right ; and around
the big middle circle they ran either way,
though when two or three were running this
circle together, while the others bounded
about the ends, they all ran the same way.
As they played, all the rings were in use at
once, the two small end rings being much
more used than the big one. The individual
deer passed rapidly from one ring to the
others, but — and here is the queerest part
of it all — I did not see a single deer,
even one of the fawns, cut across the
big circle from one end ring to the jL
other. After they were gone the rings
showed clearly in
the sand, but not
a single track led
across any of the
circles.

The object of
the play was sim-
ple enough. Aside
from the tun, the
young deer were

249

being taught to twist and double quickly;
but what the rules of the game were, and
whether they ran in opposite circles to avoid
getting dizzy, was more than I could discover,
though the deer were never more than thirty
yards away from me and I could watch every
move clearly without my field-glasses. That
the game and some definite way of playing it
were well understood by the deer no one could
doubt who watched this wonderful play for
five minutes. Though they ran swiftly, with
astonishing lightness and grace, there was no
confusion. Every now and then one of the
does would leap forward and head off one of
her fawns as he headed into the big ring,
when like a flash he would whirl in his tracks
and away with a bl-r-r-t ! of triumph or dis-
satisfaction. Once a spike buck, and again a
V doe with two well-grown fawns, trotted out of
* the woods and, after watching the dizzy play
for a moment, leaped into it as if they under-
stood perfectly what was expected.
They played this game only for
a few minutes at a time; then
they would scatter and move up

and down the shore leisurely and nose the
water. Soon one or two would come back,
and in a moment the game would be in full
swing again, the others joining it swiftly as
the little creatures whirled about the rings,
exercising every muscle and learning how to
control their graceful bodies perfectly, though
they had no idea that older heads had planned
the game for them with a purpose.

Watching them thus at their play, the
meaning of a curious bit of deer anatomy
became clear. A deer's shoulder is not
attached to the skeleton at all ; it lies loosely
inside the skin, with only a bit of delicate
elastic tissue joining it to the muscles of the
body. When a deer was headed suddenly
and braced himself in his tracks, the body
would lunge forward till the fore legs seemed
hung almost in the middle of his belly.
Again, when he kicked up his heels, they
would seem to be supporting his neck, far
forward of where they properly belonged.
This free action of the shoulder is what gives
the wonderful flexibility and grace to a deer's
movements, just as it takes and softens all

the shock of falling in his high-jumping
run among the rocks and over the endless
windfalls of the wilderness.

In the midst of the play, and after I had
watched it for a full half-hour, there was a
swift rustle in the woods on my right, and I
caught my breath sharply at sight of a mag-
nificent buck standing half hid in the under-
brush. There were two or three big bucks
with splendid antlers that lived lazily on the
slopes above this part of the lake, and that I
had been watching and following for several
weeks. Unlike the does and fawns and young
bucks, they were wild as hawks and selfish
as cats. They rarely showed themselves in
the open, and if surprised there with other
deer they bounded away at the first sight or
sniff of danger. Does and little fawns, when
they saw you, would instantly stamp and
whistle to warn the other deer before they
had taken the first step to save themselves
or investigate the danger ; but the big bucks
would bound or glide away, according to
the method of your approach, and in saving
their own skins, as they thought, would have

absolutely no concern for the safety of the
herd feeding near by. — And that is one
reason why, in a natural state, deer rarely
allow the bucks and bulls to lead them.

The summer laziness was still upon these
big bucks; the wild fall running had not
seized them. Once I saw a curious and
canny bit of their laziness. I had gone off
with a guide to try*the trout at a distant lake.
While I watched a porcupine and tried to
win his confidence with sweet chocolate —
a bad shot, by the way — the guide went on
far ahead. As he climbed a ridge, busy with
thoughts of the dim blazed trail he was fol-
lowing, I noticed a faint stir in some bushes
on one side, and through my glass I made
out the head of a big buck that was watch-
ing the guide keenly from his hiding. It
was in the late forenoon, when deer are
mostly resting, and the lazy buck
was debating, prob-
ably, whether it
were necessary for
him to run or not.
The guide passed

253

ItJJfftoufa Gun

rapidly; then to my astonishment the head
disappeared as the buck lay down where
he was.

Keeping my eyes on the spot, I followed
on the guide's trail. There was no sign of
life in the thicket as I passed, though beyond
a doubt the wary old buck was watching my
every motion keenly. When I had gone
well past and still the thicket remained all
quiet, I turned gradually and walked towards
it. There was a slight rustle as the buck
rose to his feet again. He had evidently
planned for me to follow the steps of the
other man, and had not thought it worth
while to stand up. Another slow step or
two on my part, then another rustle and a
faint motion of underbrush — so faint that,
had there been a wind blowing, my eye \vould
scarcely have noticed it — told me where the
buck had glided away silently to another
covert, where he turned and stood to find
out whether I had discovered him, or whether
my change of direction had any other motive
than the natural wandering of a man lost in
the woods.

That was far back on the ridges, where
most of the big bucks loaf and hide, each
one by himself, during the summer. Down
at the lake, however, there were two or three
that for some reason occasionally showed
themselves with the other deer, but were so
shy and wild that hunting them without a gun
was almost impossible. It was one of these
big fellows that now stood half hid in the
underbrush within twenty yards of me, watch-
ing the deer's game impatiently.

A stamp of his foot and a low snort stopped
the play instantly, and the big buck moved /
out on the shore in full view. He looked \
out over the lake, where he had so often seen K
the canoes of men moving; his nose tried () (
the wind up shore ; eyes and ears searched
below, where I was lying; then
scanned the lake again keenly.
Perhaps he had seen my canoe
upturned among the water-grasses
far awray; more probably it was
the unknown sense or feel of an
enemy, which they who hunt with
or without a gun find so often

among the larger wild animals, that made him
restless and suspicious. While he watched
and searched the lake and the shores not a
deer stirred from his tracks. Some command
was in the air which I myself seemed to feel
in my hiding. Suddenly the big buck turned
and glided away into the woods, and every
deer on the shore followed instantly without
question or hesitation. Even the little fawns,
never so heedless as to miss a signal, felt
something in the buck's attitude deeper than
their play, something perhaps in the air that
was not noticed before, and trotted after their
mothers, fading away at last like shadows
into the darkening woods.

On another lake, years before, when hunt-
ing in the same way without a gun, I saw
another curious bit of deer wisdom. It must
be remembered that deer are born apparently
without any fear of man. The fawns when
found very young in the woods are generally
full of playfulness and curiosity ; and a fawn
that has lost its mother will turn to a man
quicker than to any other animal. When
deer see you for the first time, no matter how

257

old or young they are, they approach cau-
tiously, if you do not terrify them by sudden
motions, and in twenty pretty ways try to
find out what you are. Like most wild ani- &**&*&* Gun
mals that have a keen sense of smell, and
especially like the bear and caribou, they
trust only their noses at first. When they
scent man for the first time they generally
run away, not because they know what it
means but for precisely the opposite reason,
namely, because there is in the air a strong
scent that they do not know, and that they
have not been taught by their mothers how
to meet. When in doubt run away — that is
the rule of nose which seems to be impressed
by their mothers upon all timid wild things,
though they act in almost the opposite way
when sight or hearing is in question.

All this is well known to hunters; but
now comes the curious exception. After I
had been watching the deer for some \veeks
at one of their playgrounds, a guide came
into camp with his wife and little child.
They were on their way in to their own
camp for the hunting season. To please

the little one, who was fond of all animals, I
took her with me to show her the deer play-
ing. As they were running about on the
shore I sent her out of our hiding, in a sud-
den spirit of curiosity, to see what the deer
and fawns would do. True to her instruc-
tions, the little one walked out very slowly
into the midst of them. They started at first;
two of the old deer circled down instantly to
wind her; but even after getting her scent,
the suspicious man-scent that most of them
had been taught to fear, they approached
fearlessly, their ears set forward, and their ex-
pressive tails down without any of the nerv-
ous wiggling that is so manifest whenever
their owners catch the first suspicious smell
in the air. The child, meanwhile, sat on the
shore, watching the pretty creatures with wide-
eyed curiosity, but obeying my first whispered
instructions like a little hero and keeping
still as a hunted rabbit. Two little spotted
fawns were already circling about her play-
fully, but the third went straight up to her,
stretching his nose and ears forward to show
his friendliness, and then drawing back to

259

Itfiffioufa Gun

stamp his little fore foot prettily to make the
silent child move or speak, and perhaps also
to show her in deer fashion that, though
friendly, he was not at all afraid.

There was one buck in the group, a three-
year-old with promising antlers. At first he
was the only deer that showed any fear of
the little visitor ; and his fear seemed to me
to be largely a matter of suspicion, or of irri-
tation that anything should take away the
herd's attention from himself. The fall wild-
ness was coming upon him, and he showed
it by restless fidgeting, by frequent proddings (_
of the does with his antlers, and by driving ^^ £&
them about roughly and unreasonably. Now r~T /«
he approached the child with a shake of his \f^
antlers, not to threaten her, it seemed to me,
but rather to show the other deer that he was *
still master, the Great Mogul who
must be consulted upon all occa- ri% £

sions. For the first
time the little girl
started nervously at the
threatening motion. I
called softly to her to

260

keep still and not be afraid, at the same time
rising up quietly from my hiding-place.
Instantly the little comedy changed as the
deer whirled in my direction. They had
seen men before and knew what it meant.
The white flags flew up over the startled
backs, and the air fairly bristled with whis-
tling h-e-e-e-yeu, he-u's as deer and fawns rose
over the nearest windfalls like a flock of
frightened partridges and plunged away into
the shelter of the friendly woods.

There are those who claim that the life of
an animal is a mere matter of blind instinct
and habit. Here on the shore before my
eyes was a scene that requires a somewhat
different explanation.

Though deer are the most numerous and
the most interesting animals to be hunted
without a gun, they are by no means the only
game to fill the hunter's heart
full and make him glad that his
game bag is empty. Moose are
to be found on the same waters,
and in the summer sea-
son, if approached very

slowly and quietly, especially in a canoe, they
show little fear of man. Last summer, as I stole
down the thoroughfare into Matagammon, a
cow moose and her calf loomed up before me
in the narrow stream. I watched her awhile
silently, noting her curious way of feeding, —
now pulling up a bite of lush water-grass,
now stretching her neck and her great muffle
to sweep off a mouthful of water-maple leaves,
first one then the other, like a boy with two
apples ; while the calf nosed along the shore
and paid no attention to the canoe, which he
saw perfectly but which his mother did not
see. After watching them a few minutes I
edged across to the opposite bank and drifted
down to see if it were possible to pass with-
out disturbing them. The calf was busy
with something on the bank, the mother
deep in the water-grass as I drifted by, sit-
ting low in the canoe. She saw me when
abreast of her, and after watching me a
moment in astonishment turned again to her
feeding. Then I turned the canoe slowly
and lay to leeward of them, within ten yards,
watching every significant motion. The calf

Wifhout

a Gun

was nearer to me now, and the mother by a
silent command brought him back and put
him on the side away from me; but the little
fellow's curiosity was aroused by the prohibi-
tion, and he kept peeking under his mother's
belly, or twisting his head around over her
hocks, to see who I was and what I was
doing. But there was no fear manifest, and
I backed away slowly at last and left them
feeding just where I had found them.

In curious contrast was the next meeting.
It was on the little beaver stream below Hay
Lake, a spot as wild as any dream of Dore,
and a famous feeding-ground for moose and
deer. I was fishing for trout when a mother
moose came up-stream among the bilberry
and alder bushes. I had stopped casting and
sat low in my canoe, and she did not see me
until abreast of me, within twenty feet. Then
she swung her huge head carelessly in my
direction, and went on as if I were of no
more account than one of the beaver houses
on the shore. Ten steps behind her came a
calf. The leaves had scarcely closed on her
flanks when he put his head out of the bushes

and came plump upon me. With a squeal
and a jump like a startled deer he plunged
away through the bushes, and I heard the
mother swing round in a crashing circle to
find him and to know what had frightened
him. Ten minutes later, as I sat very still
in the same spot, a huge head was thrust out
of the bushes where the calf had disappeared.
Below it, pressing close against his mother's
side, was the head of the little one, looking
out again at the thing that had frightened
him. He had brought her back to
see, and was now .plainly asking What
is it, mother? what is it? though
there was never a sound uttered.
And there they stayed for
a full minute, while none
of us moved a muscle, be-
fore they drew back silently
and disappeared, leaving
only a double line of wav-
ing, quivering bush
tops, like the trail of a

a Gun

huge snake, to tell me where they had gone.
On the same stream I got the famous bull
of the expedition. I was paddling along
silently when I turned a bend, and a huge
dark bulk loomed suddenly out of the water
dead ahead of the canoe. In front of the
dark bulk twro great antlers, the biggest
I ever saw in Maine, reached up and out.
The rest of his head was under water grop-
ing for lily roots, and my first exultant
thought was that one might drive the canoe
between the tips of those great antlers with-
out touching them, so big and wide were
they. Instead I sent the canoe swiftly for-
ward till his head began to come up, when I
crouched low and watched him, so near that
every changing expression of his huge face
and keen little eyes was seen perfectly with-
out my glasses. He saw me instantly and
dropped the root he had pulled up, and his
lower jaw7 remained hanging in his intense
wonder. Not so much who I was, but how
on earth I got there so silently seemed to be
the cause of his wonder. He took a slow
step or two in my direction, his ears set

" Lunged away at a
terrific pace "

forward stiffly and his eyes shining as he ,

watched me keenly for the slightest motion.

Then he waded out leisurely, climbed the

bank, which was here steep, and disappeared wifnoufQ Grlffi

in the woods. As he vanished I followed
him, close behind, and watched his way of
carrying his huge antlers and lifting his legs
with a high step, like a Shanghai rooster,
over the windfalls. Of all the moose that I
have ever followed, this was the only one
whose head seemed too heavy for comfort.
He carried it low, and nursed his wide antlers
tenderly among the tree trunks and alder
stems. They were still in the velvet, and no
doubt the rude scraping of the rough branches
made him wince unless he went softly. At
last, finding that I was close at his heels, he
turned for another look at me ; but I slipped
behind a friendly tree until I heard him move
on, when I followed him again. Some sus-
picion of the thing that was on his trail, or it
may be some faint eddy of air with the dan-
ger smell in it, reached him then ; he laid his
great antlers back on his shoulders, moose
fashion, and lunged away at a terrific pace

268

through the woods. I could fancy his teeth
gritting and his eyes at squint as some snap-
ping branch whacked his sensitive antlers
and made him grunt with the pain of it.
But the fear behind was all-compelling, and
in a moment I had lost him in the shadow
and silence of the big woods.

It was that same night, I think, — for my
notes make no change of time or place, —
that I had another bit of this hunting which
fills one's soul with peace and gives him a
curious sense of understanding the thoughts
and motives of the Wood Folk. I was glid-
ing along in my canoe in the late twilight
over still water, in the shadow of the wild
high meadow-grass, when a low quacking
and talking of wild ducks came to my ears.
I pushed the canoe silently into the first
open bogan in the direction of the sounds
till I was so near that I dared not go
another foot, when I rose up cautiously and
peered over the grass tops. There were per-
haps thirty or forty of the splendid birds —
four or five broods at least, and each brood
led by its careful mother — that had gathered

here for the first time from the surrounding
ponds where they had been hatched. For
two or three days past I had noticed the
young broods flying about, exercising their
wings in preparation for the long autumn
flights. Now they were all gathered on a
dry mud-flat surrounded by tall grass, play-
ing together and evidently getting acquainted.
In the middle of the flat were two or three
tussocks on which the grass had been tram-
pled and torn down. There was always a
duck on each of these tussocks, and below
him were four or five more that were plainly
trying to get up ; but the top was small and
had room for but one, and there was a deal
of quacking and good-natured scrambling for
the place of vantage. It was a game, plainly
enough, for while the birds below were trying
to get up the little fellow on top was doing
his best to keep them down. Other birds
scampered in pairs from one side of the
flat to the other; and there was
one curious procession,

269

270

or race, — five or six birds that started
abreast and very slowly, and ended with a
rush and a headlong dive into the grasses
of the opposite shore. Here and there
about the edges of the playground an old
mother bird sat on a tussock and looked
down on the wild unconscious play, wiggling
her tail in satisfaction and anon stretching
her neck to look and listen watchfully. The
voices of the playing birds were curiously low
and subdued, reminding me strongly of some
Indian children that I had once seen playing.
At times the quacking had a faint ventrilo-
quous effect, seeming to come from far away,
and again it ceased absolutely at a sign from
some watchful mother, though the play went
steadily on, as if even in their play they must
be mindful of the enemies that were watch-
ing and listening everywhere to catch them.
As I rose a bit higher to see some birds
that were very near me but screened by the
meadow-grass, my foot touched a paddle and
rattled it slightly. A single quack, different
from all others, followed instantly, and every
bird stopped just where he was and stretched

his neck high to listen. One mother bird
saw me, though I could not tell which one it
was until she slipped down from her bog and
waddled bravely across in my direction. Then
a curious thing happened, which I have often
seen and wondered at among gregarious birds
and animals. A signal was given, but with-
out any sound that my ears could detect
in the intense twilight stillness. It was as if
a sudden impulse had been sent out like an
electric shock to every bird in the large flock.
At the same instant every duck crouched
and sprang ; the wings struck down sharply ;
the flock rose together as if flung up from
a pigeon trap, and disappeared with a rush
of wings and a hoarse tumult of quacking
that told every creature on the great marsh
that danger was afoot. Wings flapped loudly
here and there ; bitterns squawked ; herons
croaked; a spike buck whistled and jumped
close at hand; a passing musquash went
down with a slap of his tail and a plunge
like a falling rock. Then silence settled over
the marsh again, and there was not a sound
to tell what Wood Folk were ^g- ,

„
iDifhout

a Gun

abroad in the still night, nor what business
or pleasure occupied them.

Formerly caribou might be found on these
same waterways, and they are the most curi-
ous and interesting game that can be hunted
without a gun; but years ago a grub de-
stroyed all the larches on which the wander-
ing woodland caribou depend largely for food.
The deer, which are already as many as the
country can support in winter, take care of
the rest of the good browse, so that there
was nothing left for the caribou but to cross
A over the line into New Brunswick, where
larches are plenty and where there is an
abundance of the barren
moss that can be dug up out
of the snow. Better still, if
one is after caribou, is the
great wilderness of northern
Newfoundland,

-

where the caribou
spend the summer
and where from a
mountain top one
' '- «•» m a y count

hundreds of the splendid animals scattered
over the country below in every direction.

And hunting them so, with the object of

finding out the secrets of their curious lives, "foiffioufa Gun

— why, for instance, each herd often chooses
its own burying-ground, or why a bull caribou
loves to pound a hollow stump for hours at a
time, — this is, to my mind, infinitely better
sport than the hunt for a head where one
waylays them on their paths of migration,
the paths that have been sacred for untold
generations, and shoots them down as they
pass like tame cattle.

To the hunter without a gun there is no
close season on any game, and a doe and her
fawns are better hunting than a ten-point
buck. By land or water he is always ready ;
there are no labors for effects, except what
he chooses to impose upon himself; no dis-
appointments are possible, for whether his
game be still or on the jump, shy as a wilder-
ness raven or full of curiosity as a blue jay, he
always finds something to stow away in his
heart in the place where he keeps things
that he loves to remember. All is fish that

toifhout
a Gun

comes into his net, and everything is game
that catches the glance of his eye in earth or
air or water. Now it is the water-spiders —
skaters the boys call them — that play a curi-
ous game among the grass stems, and that
have more wonderful habits than the com-
mon balloon spiders which sometimes turned
Jonathan Edwards' thoughts from the stern,
unlovable God of his theology to the patient,
care-taking Servant of the universe that some
call Force, and others Law, and that one
who knew Him called The Father, alike
among the lilies of the field and in the cities
of men. Now it is an otter and her cubs
playing on the surface, that sink when they
see you and suddenly come up near your
canoe, like a log shot up on end, and with
half their bodies out of water to see better
say w-h-e-e-e-yew ! like a baby seal to express
their wonder at such a queer thing in the
water. Now it is a mother loon taking her
young on her back as they leave the eggs,
and carrying them around the lake awhile to
dry them thoroughly in the sun before she
dives from under them and wets them for

the first time; and you must follow a long
while before you find out why. Now it is a
bear and her cubs — I watched three of them
for an hour or more, one afternoon, as they
gathered blueberries. At first they champed
them from the bushes, stems, leaves and all,
just as they grew. Again, when they found
a good bush, a little one with lots of berries,
they would bite it off close to the ground, or
tear it up by the roots, and then taking it by
the stem with both paws would pull it through
their mouths from one side to the other, strip-
ping off every berry and throwing the use-
less bush away. Again they would strike
the bushes with their paws, knocking off a
shower of the ripest berries, and then scrape
them all together very carefully into a pile
and gobble them down at a single mouthful.
And whenever, in wandering about after a
good bush, one of the cubs spied the other
busy at an unusually good find, it gave one
a curious remembrance of his owrn boyhood
to see the little fellow rush up whim-
pering to get his share before all the
bushes should be stripped clean.

275

ItJithoufa Gun

That was good hunting. It made one glad
to let even this rare prowler of the woods go
in peace. And that suggests the very best
thing that can be said for the hunter without
a gun : — " The wilderness and the solitary
place shall be glad for him," for something
of the gentle spirit of Saint Francis comes
with him, and when he goes he leaves no pain
nor death nor fear of man behind him.

Cheokhes, che-ok-hes', the mink.

Cheplahgan, chep-lah'gan, the bald eagle.

Ch'geegee-lokh-sis, ch' gee-gee' lock-sis, the chickadee.

Chigwooltz, chig-ivooltz' ', the bullfrog.

C16te Scarpe, a legendary hero, like Hiawatha, of the North-
ern Indians. Pronounced variously, Clote Scarpe,
Groscap, Gluscap, etc.

Commoosie, com-moo-siY, a little shelter, or hut, of boughs
and bark.

Deedeeaskh, dee-dee'ask, the blue jay.

Eleemos, el-ee'mos, the fox.

Hawahak, hd-wd-hak', the hawk.

Hukweem, Inik-iveein' , the great northern diver, or loon.

Ismaques, iss-ina-ques', the fish-hawk.

Kagax, kdg'ax, the weasel.

Kakagos, kd-ka-gos', the raven.

K'dunk, k'dunk', the toad.

279

Keeokuskh, kee-o-kusk' , the muskrat.

Keeonekh, kee'o-nek, the otter.

Killooleet, kil'loo-leet, the white-throated sparrow.

Kookooskoos, koo-koo-skoos', the great horned owl.

Koskomenos, kos'koni-e-nds' , the kingfisher.

Kupkawis, aip-ka'wis, the barred owl.

Kwaseekho, kiva-seek'ho, the sheldrake.

Lhoks, locks, the panther.

Malsun, mdl'sun, the wolf.

Meeko, vieek'o, the red squirrel.

Megaleep, meg'a-leep, the caribou.

Milicete, inil'l-cete, the name of an Indian tribe ; written

also Malicete.

Mitches, mit'chUs, the birch partridge, or ruffed grouse.
Moktaques, mok-td'ques, the hare.
Moo ween, moo-ween', the black bear.
Mooweesuk, moo-ivee'siik, the coon.
Musquash, mus'quash, the muskrat.
Nemox, ne in' ox, the fisher.
Pekompf , pe-kompf, the wildcat.
Pekquam, pek-wam' , the fisher.
Quoskh, quoskh, the blue heron.
Seksagadagee, sek'sa-ga-da'gee, the Canada grouse, or spruce

partridge.

Skooktum, skook'tum, the trout.
Tookhees, tok'hees, the woodmouse.
Umquenawis, um-que-nawis, the moose.
Unk Wunk, unk' vuunk, the porcupine.
Upweekis, up-week'iss, the Canada lynx.
Whitooweek, ivhit-oo-week' , the woodcock.

LOS

THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
This book is DUE on the last date stamped below

1960